Margaret Hamilton died on September 30, 2026, aged 90. As Director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, she built the software that ran the Apollo lunar lander, guiding multiple missions to the lunar surface and back to orbital rendezvous. She did not just write code. She coined the term 'software engineering' while at NASA, deliberately choosing it to force the field to be taken as seriously as any other engineering discipline.
The original piece is worth reading for the technical and biographical depth it provides on what Hamilton's team actually built under pressure: software that had to handle real-time priority scheduling and error recovery during the Apollo 11 descent, problems that had no prior art. The famous 1201 and 1202 program alarms during the moon landing were handled correctly because Hamilton's team had already designed the system to fail gracefully. That decision saved the mission.
Hamilton spent decades without mainstream recognition before finally receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and, yes, an official LEGO minifigure. Hackaday's 2018 biographical profile predates her public fame and goes further into the engineering decisions than any obituary will. Read that first. Then read this.
[READ ORIGINAL →]