World’s First Software Engineer | Her Code got Humans on the Moon

This article is all about Margaret Hamilton

While studying mathematics and philosophy at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, U.S.A., she would never have thought that one day she will become the first software engineer in history and will design software for the world’s first portable computer and that computer was too special as it was for NASA’s Apollo missions that carried humans to the moon. After graduating in 1958, she taught high-school mathematics for a short time. Although Margaret planned to study abstract mathematics at Brandeis University, she accepted a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT she began programming software to predict the weather and did postgraduate work in meteorology.

In the early 1960s, Hamilton joined MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where she was involved in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project, the first U.S. air defense system. She notably wrote software for a program to identify enemy aircraft. Hamilton next worked at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory (now the independent Charles Stark Draper Laboratory), which provided aeronautical technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She led a team that was tasked with developing the software for the guidance and control systems of the in-flight command and lunar modules of the Apollo missions.

Margaret Hamilton in 1969 with the source code her team developed for the Apollo missions.

At that time, no college or university taught software engineering, so the team members had to work out any problems on their own. She also coined the term software engineer.

As she was a working mother in the 1960s Hamilton usually brings her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to Apollo’s command module computer.

The achievement was a monumental task at a time when computer technology was in its infancy: The astronauts had access to only 72 kilobytes of computer memory (a 64-gigabyte cell phone today carries almost a million times more storage space). Programmers had to use paper punch cards to feed information into room-sized computers with no screen interface.

After Apollo, parts of her code went on to be used in Skylab, the first space station, and then in other space shuttle programs.

In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design.

Till now, Hamilton has published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved. Her rigorous approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions.

“She symbolises that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,” said former US President Barack Obama in 2016 when he awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award.