Margaret Hamilton, whose code saved the Apollo 11 landing, dies

Software pioneer Margaret Hamilton died in late September at the age of 90, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced on Thursday. In 1969, her program helped the Apollo 11 crew, led by Neil Armstrong, land on the Moon. Hamilton headed the MIT laboratory that won a NASA contract to build the onboard software for the Apollo project.

Code that anticipated errors

Hamilton tried to prepare the program for emergencies as well. That proved decisive: shortly before touchdown, the onboard computer sounded an alarm. Overloaded by a hardware fault, the system might not have coped with the demanding landing procedure.

But the Apollo 11 software built by Hamilton’s team worked on a system of priorities: it shut down unnecessary background tasks to make way for those critical to the mission. That is why the Moon landing succeeded.

Hamilton continued working at the Instrumentation Lab until the 1970s. As the Apollo programme was winding down, the lab split off from MIT and became the independent Draper Laboratory. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hamilton founded two companies built around her approach to software engineering, with an emphasis on preventing errors.

“Margaret left an indelible mark on Draper, and we will always be grateful to her for it,” said Draper president and CEO Jerry Wohletz. According to him, she helped ensure the astronauts landed safely on the Moon and returned home.

The fight to have the profession recognised

Throughout her career, Hamilton pushed for software engineering to be recognised as a discipline in its own right. “I fought to give software legitimacy so that it and its practitioners would be given due respect. That is why I began using the term ‘software engineering’,” she told El País in 2018. At first the phrase was considered amusing and was a source of jokes for a long time, but in the end software earned the same respect as any other field.

She received numerous prizes and awards over her lifetime, and in 2016 the then US president Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“To say that Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer and ahead of her time would be a serious understatement,” said Olivier de Weck, Apollo Program Professor and head of MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. According to him, she not only wrote cutting-edge code but also led the team that created one of the most complex systems in human history.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz