Margaret Hamilton, who led Apollo's flight software team, has died at 90
MIT's obituary traces how a temporary job writing weather software led to the code that landed Apollo.
Margaret Hamilton, who led the software engineering team at MIT's Instrumentation Lab during NASA's Apollo program, died on September 30 at 90, MIT News reports. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, wrote software for the SAGE air-defense project before Apollo, and later became an entrepreneur and CEO. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and is credited with helping establish software engineering as a discipline.
It was the most-upvoted story on Hacker News this week.
-
Apollo Guidance Computer
After exploring Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90, the machine her team programmed was Apollo Guidance Computer.
The computer aboard each Apollo command module and lunar module, handling guidance, navigation and control. It was the first computer based on silicon integrated circuits, with performance comparable to 1970s home computers.
Wikipedia · Swim · 30 min
0