Tech Women: Margaret Hamilton Wrote Code For Moon Mission

We all know that Neil Armstrong was the first person to step on the moon but do you know that there was a woman who helped write the computer code for the command and lunar modules used on the Apollo missions to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s? The same woman also coined the term software engineering to give a better description of what she does. This brilliant woman is Margaret Hamilton. She was an American Computer scientist who was also one of the first computer software programmers. 

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Education

Born in 1936 in Indiana, US, she studied Math and Philosophy at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She graduated in 1958 and took to teaching high school mathematics for some time. After this, she started working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she began programming software to predict the weather and did postgraduate work in meteorology.

"I began to use the term software engineering to distinguish from hardware and other kinds of engineering. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline."

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Career and milestone achievements

• In the early 1960s, Hamilton joined MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where she worked in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project. It was the first US air defense system.
• She wrote a software for a program that identified enemy aircraft.
• After this, Hamilton worked at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory which provided aeronautical technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
• She headed a team entrusted with the onus of developing software for the guidance and control systems of the in-flight command and lunar modules of the Apollo missions.
• Hamilton herself specifically concentrated on software to detect system errors and to recover information in a computer crash. It was due to these two elements that the Apollo 11 mission emerged successful.
• Thereafter, Hamilton started working in the private sector. She co-founded the company Higher Order Software in 1976 and established Hamilton Technologies 10 years later.
• She has published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved.

Accolades

Her stellar contribution in the field of science has been acknowledged time and again. Here are the few recent ones:

• On November 22, 2016, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama for her work leading the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.
• On April 28, 2017, she received the "Computer History Museum Fellow Award" that honours extraordinary men and women whose ideas have transformed the world.

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