Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

Second conference

September 14, 2001

Academic Environment

SLAVA GEROVITCH: Was there any interaction between the Instrumentation Lab and the rest of MIT as an institution, with undergrads or grad students?

MARGARET HAMILTON: We've hired a lot of people from MIT.

DAN LICKLY: There was close interaction about the time Apollo started. Because it wasn't so big and it was closely tied with the Aero Department. And the instrumentation lab was part of MIT then. Do you remember the faculty club, athletic and so on? Like Lincoln Labs. I don't know. Maybe Lincoln Labs still are. But then, at some point, due to Vietnam protests, the lab split off. I don't remember, early '70s or so?

ALEX KOSMALA: '69, I think.

DAN LICKLY: And became less connected.

FRED MARTIN: There were connections. There were students. We always had research assistants that were around. People like me who did that twice. I went from employee and then became a student and got a Masters and then became a student, got a Ph.D. and so on. But there were always students around. Some of them turned into astronauts like Buzz Aldrin and I think Ed Mitchell and some others that were in the Aero Department at one time.

JIM MILLER: Dave Scott was another one.

FRED MARTIN: These turned out to be students of Dick Battin. They all wanted to know something about guidance and control. I think probably students of Wally VanderVelde as well. So there was a connection into MIT. Although I don't think any of the people, other than these students that I mentioned, I don't think that the employees thought of themselves, in anyway, as academics of any kind. They were working engineers in a laboratory associated with MIT. There was some vague organizational connection up above that certain MIT policies would flow down whether it was retirement benefits or health benefits and other things of that nature. Library cards.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Going to the faculty club.

FRED MARTIN: Going to the faculty club. Things of that nature that you had. One big difference in the laboratory, as opposed to some other laboratories, I'm not sure about the Radiation Lab but I know, with respect to Lincoln Labs-- Lincoln at that time was a line item laboratory in the Air Force. The Air Force had a budget. And they said there's a budget for Lincoln Laboratories. And they did all their work under this budget item. The Instrumentation Lab didn't have any budget input in that sense. They had to scrounge around and do their own marketing and find work and so on. And of course, Draper got this huge sole source contract to do Apollo, which was magnificent.

Basically, the lab was not a kept lab. They had to get out there in the world and find that business. That was a big distinction between this laboratory and some of the other MIT labs. 

I think the thing that Dan is referring to is that during the Vietnam War, there were tremendous student gatherings on campus here. And all kinds of protests. I think I had just left the lab, and I can't remember what the essence of what they were protesting at the lab. I think it was ballistic missile work.

ALEX KOSMALA: Just a military defense contract. They said it had no place in academia.

FRED MARTIN: You had the Instrumentation Laboratory. This whole section was Apollo you might say. But there are other sections of the lab that were doing inertial guidance work for ballistic missiles and so on. We heard stories of them having barriers across the doors and bolts and this and that. And pressure to divest the laboratory from the school. Eventually, some accommodation was made with respect to the organization structure.

Hugh Blair-Smith adds:

During the student unrest of 1969, there were indeed stout wooden bars fitted to steel brackets at the doorways even of the Apollo-dedicated Building IL-7.

DAN LICKLY: All of us were in one building right around the corner here on Cambridge Parkway. We weren't over in main MIT. We were down towards Lotus. Lotus wasn't there then. A bunch of warehouses.

__: The building is gone.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Right next to the Sonesta hotel.

FRED MARTIN: Of course Apollo didn't start in there. We sort of gathered into that building. We started in other places. The lab had-- That was W6, right? [simultaneous conversation] 7. W6 was way down on Vassar Street. And then there was 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. You had a garage and you had an old shoe polish building. Apollo began in these other buildings with various groups of a few people here and a few people there. I can't remember the exact date when everybody was gathered.

DAN LICKLY: They had the big computers down there in the first floor and Dick Battin in the corner.

FRED MARTIN: When I went to work for Dick, he was in W1 near that elevator shaft.

JIM MILLER: On the fourth floor.

FRED MARTIN: So it must have been 1962 or so that everybody was gathered and brought into this one building. You had things on the roof too. Didn't you have a sextant and something on the roof of this building that did star sightings.

DAN LICKLY: When we all moved to the second floor is when you had the project organization and all of that. We took over all the second floor.

FRED MARTIN: I thought that Nevins or John Dahlen or somebody had optical equipment.

JIM MILLER: It seems to me that was done at W6 (224 Albany Street).

DAN LICKLY: A lot of it was but they had the thing on the roof that you could look-- They had that thing you sat in up there. Doc Draper's toy.

Anyway, it was quite a time in there starting in the early 60s and escalated as you got closer and closer to each flight.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: Did you have any international contacts? Did you go abroad to Europe, for example? Do you have any foreign contacts? Was anybody from abroad interested in what you were doing?

FRED MARTIN: I'm sure there was great interest but I can't recall. It wasn't like space lab. I did some work on space lab where you had a real international group that you were—

DAN LICKLY: Nobody in the world was doing much, yet. So it was all pretty early. There were individuals interested. But there wasn't any institutional interest that I remember.

ALEX KOSMALA: There was huge popular interest.

MARGARET HAMILTON: I presented a paper in Paris at a conference on a theory that had come out of the Apollo project. Part of our organization sent us there. So in that way. But it wasn't really what we did on Apollo. It was what came as a result of it.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: Were they interested?

MARGARET HAMILTON: Very interested. 

DAN LICKLY: That was about mid-70s.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Early 70s. But it was still part of the Apollo group. The Colloque sur la Programmation was the name of the conference in Paris. It was attended by mostly academics, not application types. But there was a lot of interest.

DAN LICKLY: During Apollo, most of our trips were to Houston. Or for those of us that dealt with Rockwell, out to Rockwell. It was all the business meetings.

FRED MARTIN: I was shocked when I first made a trip to North American. You have the Cambridge scene here. Everybody has his own office. Everything is sort of quiet. You look out the window or you might see the river.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Watch the planes take off from my office. That was my favorite thing.

FRED MARTIN: Then you made these business trips out to Rockwell to North American. What you were faced with was this three-block long, open hangar with God knows how many people in the hangar, and telephones ringing, and the noises.

ALEX KOSMALA: The far corners of the building were lost in the smoke.

FRED MARTIN: The contrast. You wondered how anybody got any work done. The contrast between what we used to think of as the aerospace industry and the norm of how people worked in this aerospace versus the norm of what we were doing at MIT was like night and day. It was just a different world.

DAN LICKLY: They were metal benders and they wanted to build ten thousand more airplanes if we told them how.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Our offices looked like graduate students' offices at MIT. You walked in there-- I came from the Mathematics Department and I felt like it was part of the same environment. It was not like a big corporation outside of MIT.

JIM MILLER: It was interesting in the early years, to me, to find that MIT people -- we were never Instrumentation Lab people; we were always MIT people for whatever reason - although we had this local environment of our own, when we went out to North American, we found that we were the communication means between parts of North American that we interfaced with that didn't talk to each other. Often, we were the ones that told them things that their own management should have told them. But they were really glad to know. We served a very useful, if inadvertent, function that way.

MARGARET HAMILTON: It's interesting that you say that. Because the glue that Alex was talking about when we put together the different programs for powered flight, navigation, control and everything, we found that we were a communication vehicle for the entire mission software as well as for the different groups that were being interfaced. That's how we learned about everything in the software. We didn't really know what was inside of every module -- or at least, I was less familiar than you -- inside the black boxes. But we really knew how they all tied together.

DAN LICKLY: One more thing you probably should say about this-- Working at the lab, which was MIT, we were in a very privileged position. We got to see and talk to not only all the astronauts, everybody at NASA, all over the place. Werner von Braun would come and visit. I remember giving him lectures on what we were doing. All those people we got to talk to as a small sort of elite organization.

When the flights were going off, the Apollo flights, we were tied in very closely on those headsets and boxes. I can remember one flight. I don't remember what and who I was talking with in Houston. It might have been Jack Garman. It was a problem we had and I said, "I think we need an erasable dump. Will you get one?" Within 30 seconds on the main command, Cap Com to the astronauts, "MIT wants a dump." Will you do it. Something or other. It was always MIT wants this and that. I felt anything we did was going to get there and back very quickly. That might have been the time we were worried about the erasable being messed up.

FRED MARTIN: I also thought some people attributed sort of a pedestal standing to us that maybe I don't think we really deserved. There was one thing that happened I so vividly recall. There was a landing on the moon and it was successful. It was just after that landing or it could have been just before. We used to go to these dinners at Lock Ober's. And I don't know how many I went to, maybe four. Doc Draper was very expansive about this and he'd want to get all his people there. He'd always have some astronauts in there because that was kind of fun. I remember this dinner; I was sitting next to Frank Borman and we were eating dinner. And Frank Borman, somewhere in the conversation, he felt that, the people at MIT, we were all sort of geniuses. Everybody was a guru and everybody was a genius.

Then he said to me something like, you guys at MIT. You ought to get out of this program now. It's going to be just grinding it out. He said, there's not going to be anything more of interest. There's nothing more that you guys can do. You ought to go off and do something bigger and more interesting than Apollo. I thought that was interesting.

DAN LICKLY: So we followed Frank into Eastern Airlines.

FRED MARTIN: That's exactly right.

DAN LICKLY: We did have a good position. But also there were so many of the astronauts that had previous connections at MIT that we weren't poked fun at too much. We had some inside tracks.

Historical lessons

site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown