Margaret Hamilton obituary — SkimNews
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- Margaret Hamilton directed the software engineering division at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led development of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) — the first computer in the world based on silicon-integrated circuits.
- During Apollo 11's lunar descent in July 1969, Hamilton recognized from prior simulations that repeated radar-switch alarms shouldn't trigger an abort, prompting mission controllers to let Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin continue; the Eagle landed safely.
- Hamilton coined the term "software engineering" to distinguish her practical programming work from theoretical computer science and to explain her department's duties to non-specialists.
- The first woman to work on the Apollo project at MIT, she rose to director of a team of about 100 programmers in a NASA programme almost entirely staffed by men in the 1960s.
- Hamilton earned the nickname "the rope mother" because Apollo's onboard core memory was hand-woven from copper strands laced through magnets by professional seamstresses, with Hamilton personally double-checking the work.
- She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2016 and was featured as a Lego minifigure in the 2017 Women of NASA set alongside Sally Ride, Mae Jemison, and Nancy Roman.
- Her daughter Lauren's accidental activation of program P01 on a command-module simulator crashed the system during testing — Hamilton documented the error, which later enabled a mid-mission fix when the same program triggered during Apollo 8 in 1968.
Why it matters: Hamilton's insistence on exhaustive simulation saved Apollo 11 from a potential abort and her coinage of "software engineering" gave a discipline its professional name. Smithsonian curator Andrew Meade McGee said her AGC-era practices "reshaped the computing industry and software education, and still have influence today," framing her as a foundational figure whose code reached the Moon while the profession she named now underpins every modern device.
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