Monday, October 12, 2026

Software Hero


This is Margaret Hamilton and standing next to her is the source code for the flight control software that helped land Apollo 11 (the first men on the moon) Margaret lead the project that created this code, code that performed exceptionally well even though at one critical point the astronauts overloaded it with too many tasks, causing a buttock clenching moment when an error code was displayed about 3 minutes from touchdown! The software handled the scenario in exactly the way that Margaret had previously thought about and programmed it to do, allowing a safe landing.

Sadly, Margaret died last Wednesday, aged 90, but what a hero, she even coined the term "Software Engineering", and in doing so made much more of an impact on the world than most of us have ever have. RIP Margaret and thanks for all that code!

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