Margaret Hamilton has died
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Margaret Hamilton, Apollo software lead and computing pioneer, has died at 90.
Margaret Hamilton, who led the MIT team that developed the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program, died on Sep. 30 at age 90. She coined "software engineering," pioneered priority-driven and defensive programming, and her code famously handled a 1202 alarm during Apollo 11's lunar landing. After MIT, she founded two software companies and created the Universal Systems Language. She received the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom and became a Lego minifigure. Her software is credited with helping astronauts land safely on the moon.
What commenters are saying
Commenters widely view Hamilton as a legendary figure worthy of an HN black bar. Many highlight her coining of "software engineering" and her priority-scheduler design that saved Apollo 11 from a computer overload during descent. Several share links to her oral history and a photo of her next to the Apollo code. One commenter corrects a common simplification of the 1201/1202 alarm story, pointing to a more complex explanation on Wikipedia. Another notes her early work on weather software for Edward Lorenz, linking her to chaos theory.