Margaret Hamilton, Apollo software pioneer who coined ‘software engineering’, dies at 90
Margaret Hamilton, the computing pioneer who led the team that built the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program, has died at 90. She died on September 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT announced her death this week.
Hamilton was the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory and led engineers whose priority-driven software architecture saved the Apollo 11 landing when the onboard computer was overloaded moments before touchdown.
She is credited with popularising the term “software engineering” and helping establish it as a discipline. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A 1969 photograph of Hamilton beside a towering stack of printed Apollo code became an iconic image of computing history.
