Margaret Hamilton was a really important computer programmer who helped write the software that sent the first people to the moon (and brought them back safely!). She’s known as one of the first people in the field of software engineering, and her work helped create the way we design super reliable software today.
In 1959, when she was 23, she started working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She worked on the Project Sage Philco-Ford, where she used radar to track airplanes that no one knew about. She learned a lot by doing this work at a time when computer science and software engineering weren’t even taught in universities yet! That’s where Margaret learned how to program computers and even ended up designing a small operating system.
In 1963, she saw a job offer that would change everything. They were looking for programmers to… design the software for the rockets that would take the first humans to the moon! She became the very first person hired to program the computers for the Apollo missions.
One of the coolest things she did while leading the development of the operating system for the Apollo missions was creating a system that could handle errors and do tasks at different times. This system was super important just before the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon.
Margaret was really focused on finding and preventing mistakes, which made her code very strong and dependable. This made her stand out, and she quickly moved up in her job. In just two years, she went from a junior programmer to the head programmer for the onboard computer navigation software for the Apollo missions.
While she was at MIT, Margaret Hamilton always tried to make people see the software her team was creating as important work, so that the project and the people working on it would get the respect they deserved. That’s why she started calling everything they did “software engineering.” She wanted it to be recognized as a real type of engineering and its own field of study.
Today, people agree that her work and her team’s work were really important for the development of software engineering. In 2003, she even received a special award from NASA for all her contributions.
Margaret Hamilton continued to work on different NASA missions, like the first American space station (Skylab) and the space shuttle, until 1976. After that, she decided to focus more on developing technology on her own and co-founded a company. She also wrote many scientific papers about computers. She even developed a new computer programming language that she thought was “a completely different way of thinking about software and systems.” In 1986, she wanted even more independence and started her own company called “Hamilton Technologies.”
In 1986, she received her first big award, the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, given by the Association for Women in Computing. Luckily, that was just the first of many, especially in more recent years. In 2016, she received the highest honor in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Some of her other cool honors include being the main character in a children’s book called «Margaret and the Moon» in 2017, and being included in the «Women of NASA» LEGO set. Being in a LEGO set like that is a big deal, usually only for super popular characters like Batman and Superman!
