V · Craft & community
Margaret Hamilton
1936–
Hamilton Technologies · ex-MIT Instrumentation Lab
Gave us
The Apollo flight software. Coined the term "software engineering". Foundational work on fault-tolerance and priority scheduling — used to recover Apollo 11's landing computer when alarms went off seconds before touchdown.
The story
Photographed standing next to a stack of Apollo source-code printouts taller than she was. The image is the most-shared piece of programming history on the internet.
"I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect."