Margaret Hamilton

The software engineer whose onboard flight code put Apollo on the Moon and recovered it from its worst moment.

Specifications & Metrics

era

born 1936

Core Principles & Analysis

• She coined the term 'software engineering' to make the discipline legible.
• Her asynchronous-executive design let the Apollo 11 computer shed low-priority work during the 1202 alarm.
• The Moon landing happened, in part, because the code refused to crash.