Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

In 2019, to celebrate 50 years to the Apollo landing, Google decided to make a tribute to Hamilton. The mirrors at the Ivanpah plant were configured to create a picture of Hamilton and the Apollo 11 by moonlight.

When Hamilton started using the term "software engineering" during the early Apollo missions, software development was not taken seriously compared to other engineering, nor was it regarded as a science. Hamilton was concerned with legitimizing software development as an engineering discipline. Over time the term "software engineering" gained the same respect as any other technical discipline. The IEEE Software September/October 2018 issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of software engineering. Hamilton talks about "Errors" and how they influenced her work related to software engineering and how her language, USL, could be used to prevent the majority of "Errors" in a system. Writing in Wired, Robert McMillan noted: "At MIT she assisted in the creation of the core principles in computer programming as she worked with her colleagues in writing code for the world's first portable computer". Hamilton's innovations go beyond the feats of playing an important role in getting humans to the Moon. According to Wired's Karen Tegan Padir: "She, along with that other early programming pioneer, COBOL inventor Grace Hopper, also deserve tremendous credit for helping to open the door for more women to enter and succeed in STEM fields like software."

On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.

Hamilton was the CEO of HOS through 1984 and left the company in 1985. In March 1986, she founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language (USL) and its associated automated environment, the 001 Tool Suite, based on her paradigm of development before the fact for systems design and software development.

In 1976, Hamilton co-founded with Saydean Zeldin a company called Higher Order Software (HOS) to further develop ideas about error prevention and fault tolerance emerging from their experience at MIT working on the Apollo program. They created a product called USE.IT, based on the HOS methodology they developed at MIT. It was successfully used in numerous government programs including a project to formalize and implement C-IDEF, an automated version of IDEF, a modeling language developed by the U.S. Air Force in the Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) project. In 1980, British-Israeli computer scientist David Harel published a proposal for a structured programming language derived from HOS from the viewpoint of and/or subgoals. Others have used HOS to formalize the semantics of linguistic quantifiers, and to formalize the design of reliable real-time embedded systems.

Hamilton then joined the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT, which worked on the Apollo Space Mission. Hamilton was initially hired as a programmer for this process but moved on into systems design. By 1965, she was in charge of all Command Module software, which was all the software for navigation and lunar landing guidance. Hamilton's team was responsible for developing in-flight software, which included algorithms designed by various senior scientists for the Apollo command module, Apollo lunar module, and the subsequent Skylab. Another part of her team designed and developed the systems software. This included error detection and recovery software such as restarts and the Display Interface Routines (also known as the Priority Displays), which Hamilton designed and developed. She worked to gain hands-on experience during a time when computer science courses were uncommon and software engineering courses did not exist. Hamilton also served as Director of the Software Engineering Division.

From 1961 to 1963, Hamilton worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project at the MIT Lincoln Lab, where she was one of the programmers who wrote software for the prototype AN/FSQ-7 computer (the XD-1), used by the U.S. Air Force to search for possibly unfriendly aircraft. She also wrote software for a satellite tracking project at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. The SAGE Project was an extension of Project Whirlwind, started by MIT to create a computer system that could predict weather systems and track their movements using simulators. SAGE was soon developed for military use in anti-aircraft air defense. Hamilton said:

In Boston, Hamilton initially intended to enroll in graduate study in abstract mathematics at Brandeis. However, in mid-1959, Hamilton began working for Edward Norton Lorenz, in the meteorology department at MIT. She developed software for predicting weather, programming on the LGP-30 and the PDP-1 computers at Marvin Minsky's Project MAC. Her work contributed to Lorenz's publications on chaos theory. At the time, computer science and software engineering were not yet established disciplines; instead, programmers learned on the job with hands-on experience. She moved on to another project in the summer of 1961, and hired and trained Ellen Fetter as her replacement.

She met her first husband, James Cox Hamilton, in the mid-1950s while attending college. They were married on June 15, 1958, the summer after she graduated from Earlham. She briefly taught high school mathematics and French at a public school in Boston, Indiana. The couple then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where they had a daughter, Lauren, born on November 10, 1959. They divorced in 1967 and Margaret married Dan Lickly two years later.

Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Margaret Elaine Heafield was born August 17, 1936, in Paoli, Indiana, to Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield (née Partington). The family later moved to Michigan, where Margaret graduated from Hancock High School in 1954. She studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College, where her mother was a student; she earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1958. She cites Florence Long, the head of the math department at Earlham, as helping with her desire to pursue abstract mathematics and become a mathematics professor. She says her poet father and headmaster grandfather inspired her to include a minor in philosophy in her studies.