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Margaret Hamilton Takes Software Engineering To the Moon and Beyond

Author: Adam Fabio / Source: Hackaday

If you were to create a short list of women who influenced software engineering, one of the first picks would be Margaret Hamilton. The Apollo 11 source code lists her title as “PROGRAMMING LEADER”. Today that title would probably be something along the line of “Lead software engineer”

Margaret Hamilton was born in rural Indiana in 1931. Her father was a philosopher and poet, who, along with grandfather, encouraged her love of math and sciences.

She studied mathematics with a minor in philosophy, earning her BA from Earlham College in 1956. While at Earlham, her plan to continue on to grad school was delayed as she supported her husband working on his own degree from Harvard. Margaret took a job at MIT, working under Professor Edward Norton Lorenz on a computer program to predict the weather. Margaret cut her teeth on the desk-sized LGP-30 computer in Norton’s office.

Hamilton soon moved on to the SAGE program, writing software which would monitor radar data for incoming Russian bombers. Her work on SAGE put Margaret in the perfect position to jump to the new Apollo navigation software team.

The Apollo guidance computer software team was designed at MIT, with manufacturing done at Raytheon. To say this was a huge software project for the time would be an understatement. By 1968, over 350 engineers were working on software. 1400 man-years of software engineering were logged before Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface, and the project was lead by Margaret Hamilton.

Forget it

Margaret was still considered a beginner programmer when she started work on the Apollo program. As you might expect, she was given a very low priority task: write software that would run in the event of an abort. This was software that would be used for one of the early tests, so no one expected the abort code to be run. Margaret even named the program “forget it”. Margaret was an instant expert, called into NASA to explain how her software worked, and answer questions.

Eventually, Margaret became the lead programmer for the guidance computer. She was not a hands-off manager though — she was very much in the trenches, working to get men to the moon and back again. By this time she was also a working parent. During the many late night and weekend work sessions, she would bring her daughter Lauren in. Margaret would run tests, and “play astronaut” and Lauren would play along with her.

P01 program note

During one test session, Lauren entered something at the controls. The guidance computer immediately crashed, bringing the whole system down. Margaret investigated and found that Lauren had inadvertently loaded up the P01 pre-launch program while the command module was in flight. If an astronaut did this during a mission, it would be disastrous, as the P01 program would erase all the computers navigation data. The ship would be flying blind.

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