![]() ![]() This overloaded the computer on the ship, giving it multiple commands, similar to what Lauren had done. During the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, the ship’s software detected a critical error that caused it to abort the landing program just three minutes before touchdown. These changes had a level of sophistication that would prevent such accidents from occurring during the real flights, and brought attention to inflight emergencies. After that prophetic incident, her superiors defaulted to Hamilton’s suggestion and let her implement the necessary changes. In a subsequent Apollo 8 mission, however, one of the astronauts accidentally replicated Lauren’s random pressing (the “Lauren bug”, as Hamilton called it), which created a cascade of issues that required the mission to be reconfigured. ![]() However, her concerns were dismissed by her superiors at MIT and NASA, overconfident in the astronauts’ ability to evade such mistakes. This created an alarming epiphany for Hamilton, realizing “my God – this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.” Inspired by her daughter’s childish antics, she brought up suggested changes to finesse the software in order to prevent this from occurring in real life. One day, Lauren accidentally initiated a pre-launch program for a simulated flight to the Moon that erased navigation data mid-flight. Trying to imitate her mother programming, Lauren would often press random keys on the computer. In addition to leading a team of programmers, Hamilton also raised her daughter, Lauren, whom she would frequently take to work. Software development wasn’t seen as a valuable profession compared to established engineering disciplines (Hamilton would often joke “hey, we’re engineering, too”), so Hamilton came up with the term “software engineering” to give the field more credibility. Notably, Hamilton coined the term ‘software engineering’. ![]() The number of software engineers increased to around 100, with Hamilton leading them. As time progressed, many began to appreciate the importance of not just building the computers on the Apollo spacecrafts, but the sophistication of the software needed to leverage their full potential and keep the astronauts safe during their voyage. Her prior software development experience helped fill in a key niche for the project that the hardware engineers lacked. She was first to apply for the position as well as the first woman hired by the lab. The idea of helping humanity ascend to the stars, as well as the novel use of her programming skills drew her into rerouting her career trajectory. The advertisement sought people to develop software to “send man to the moon” in fulfillment of a NASA contract for the Apollo mission. Computer science was a nascent field at the time with scarce documentation, so Hamilton learned on the job, which engendered a great affinity for the emerging field.Īs Hamilton began to consider going to grad school, her husband informed her of a recent newspaper advertisement from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. There, she learned the fundamentals of computers and programming. The couple then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where Hamiliton took a job at MIT’s meteorology department in the lab of Edward Lorenz, who pioneered the field of chaos theory. Shortly after graduation, she married fellow classmate, James Cox Hamilton, and briefly taught high school math while he completed his collegiate education. She followed her mother’s footsteps to Earlham College where she graduated with a degree in mathematics, and was encouraged in her pursuits by the head of Earlham’s math department, Florence Long. In particular, she served as a brain behind the flight software that enabled us to step foot on the moon for the first time, and return safely. Hamilton may not carry as much name-recognition as Ada, but very much earns the merit of recognition for her contributions to the NASA Apollo missions. We have a tradition of naming our computers after women computer scientists, including Ada Lovelace and Margaret Hamilton. I work in the lab of Jeremy Purvis, where we do a lot of fluorescence microscopy for our research, and have dedicated computers for processing the resulting imaging data.
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