Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton standing next to a stack of Apollo Guidance Computer source code 
which was written by her and her team, in 1969.
Credit: MIT Museum

Margaret Hamilton was born in Indiana in August 1936 and studied mathematics at the University of Michigan and Earlham College. In 1958, she graduated with her bachelor's degree and later accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she developed weather prediction software for professor Edward N. Lorenz. At the time, computer programmers learned their profession by hands-on training as there weren't any computer science programs at universities yet.

From 1961-1963, Hamilton worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project, the first U.S. air defense system, at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. Hamilton's next project brought her to MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory which provided aeronautical technology for NASA. She was the lead of a team tasked with developing software for the guidance and control systems of the in-flight command and lunar modules of the Apollo missions. As mentioned above, software engineering wasn't offered in schools at the time, so the team members had to work out problems on their own. Hamilton focused on creating software to detect system errors and to recover information in a computer crash.

Hamilton was in charge of the Apollo (and later Skylab, the United States's first space station) on-board flight software effort while also serving as Director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory. During her time at MIT, she wanted to give her team's software legitimacy so that it and those building it would be given its due respect, and so she coined the term "software engineering" to distinguish it from other types of engineering. So, Margaret Hamilton is the founder of the software engineering discipline. That's pretty awesome.

Margaret Hamilton in an Apollo Command Module.

During the Apollo era, Hamilton and her team evolved their software engineering rules with each new relevant discovery. The space mission software had to be perfect - not only did it have to work, it had to work the first time. The software had to be incredibly reliable, and it needed to perform error detection and recovery in real time. Hamilton's devotion to this software engineering paid off in a huge way during the Apollo 11 mission.

Margaret Hamilton at MIT during the Apollo 11 mission.

Right before the Apollo 11 astronauts were about to land on the Moon, the software program overrode normal operations to let them know that something was wrong. Problems arose when the computer was overloaded with commands from the rendezvous radar and the landing system, requiring more processing power than the computer could handle. Fortunately, Hamilton had programmed the computer to prioritize tasks according to importance and not sequence. Thus, the astronauts were able to successfully land on the Moon instead of aborting the approach due to computer issues.

Margaret Hamilton, CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc.

In the mid-1970s, Hamilton left MIT to work in the private sector. She co-founded the company Higher Order Software in 1976 and established Hamilton Technologies, Inc. ten years later. Her rigorously specified design methods have become the basis for many software engineering techniques today.

Hamilton has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including NASA's Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

(A special thanks to one of my readers, Dana, for pushing Margaret to the top of my blog list!)