Margaret Hamilton, who wrote the code that landed Apollo 11, dies at 90
Margaret Hamilton, who led software development for Apollo program, dies at 90
Margaret Hamilton, the MIT computer scientist who led the software engineering team for NASA's Apollo program, died on Sep. 30 at 90. She coined the term 'software engineering,' pioneered priority-driven and defensive programming, and her code saved the Apollo 11 moon landing when a 1202 alarm struck. She later founded two software companies and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way, and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.
- diskzero
I was able to meet her, and others who worked at the MIT Instrumentation/Draper Lab, as a start-up I was with received funding from a VC firm founded by other Draper Lab members from the Apollo era. I was totally out of my league talking with them. This was thirty years ago and I remember her talking about formalized control systems. It was fascinating but went totally over my head. My startup was a fairly silly multimedia CD-ROM company and I was just happy to be in the room.
- WarOnPrivacy
Dang. She was a remarkable stand-out, in fields full of remarkable people.
The pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
- muunbo
Margaret Hamilton actually coined the term "software engineer" IIRC. Rest in peace
- EvanAnderson
There is a very nice oral history the Computer History Museum produced: https://computerhistory.org/blog/margaret-hamilton-in-her-ow...
In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz.
- 101008
Her story and her work is so inspiring. And I feel a bit sad reading about it...
When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.
Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.
- sib
"Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust."
If only!
- leelasankhar
I feel very sad. I always wished I could meet her and have a little talk. She'll be forever remembered thanks to that coolest badass picture of her. Om shanti!
- marcelo-earth
RIP. I'll always remember her iconic pic with the stack of printed code