Margaret Hamilton, who led the team developing software for NASA's Apollo missions and coined the term "software engineering," passed away at the age of 90 on September 30. News of her passing was announced only early this morning, and her family has not disclosed the cause of death.
Born in India in 1936, she went on to pursue studies in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955. After completing her studies, she joined the meteorology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop weather forecasting software. This marked the beginning of her involvement in software development.
Subsequently, in 1961, she worked as a programmer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project, the United States' first air defense system. She later joined the MIT Instrumentation Lab to develop software for the Apollo moon missions. She was the first programmer hired for the project, and her exceptional abilities led to her appointment as the lead for the development of the software used in the Apollo space capsules.
In 1969, following the successful Apollo 11 moon landing, a photograph was taken of Hamilton standing beside the entire printed stack of Apollo mission software code. This image went viral online, as many were unaware of the sheer volume of code written for the Apollo missions—or that the development had been led by a woman.
While developing the Apollo mission software, she coined the term "software engineering," a concept that did not exist previously. She introduced the term because, at the time, programming was not recognized as a branch of engineering, and software development was not taken seriously. During her lifetime, Margaret Hamilton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award (2003), and the Computer History Museum Fellow Award (2017), and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame (2022).
In the world of entertainment, the character Margo Madison in the Apple TV series *For All Mankind* was inspired by her.
