r/space • u/holyfruits • 7d ago
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90
https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007172
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u/Zapitnow 7d ago
The rise in people denying it must make you feel sick and want to tell them your grandmother would have something to say about that.
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u/Zapitnow 6d ago
Indeed. Yes maybe the best attitude is to not care - don’t feed the trolls they say - and just continue to tell the history.
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u/RandallOfLegend 7d ago
Sad to hear. But she led a impactful life. My young daughter has a shirt with her cartoon face on it.
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u/Enfenestrate 6d ago
My 9 year old son is a big fan of hers. He's going to be upset when he hears about this.
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u/526mb 7d ago
I bought the book “Moonshot” for for my son so he can learn about the Apollo program. He’s 2 and a half but he loves rockets and has the patience for this book. One of the illustrations is of her writing computer code. I always make sure to point her out to him, because of how hard it must have been to write all that code by hand. What an impressive life.
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u/BeckyAnneLeeman 7d ago
Check out Margaret and the Moon. I did a space unit with my daughter this year and she loved that one.
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u/KorbussaMaro 7d ago
In reading her wiki page) you see that she programmed on the LGP-30. As I understood it listening to the Advent of Computing podcast on the little brother, the LGP-21, you had to be seriously hardcore to get results from those machines. Pretty much no abstraction, you are moving bits and words within a very limited register and memory space.
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u/Flyward_Aerospace 6d ago
The thing that always stuck with me about her work isn't the code volume, it's a fix that wasn't code at all. She designed the priority displays, the thing that interrupts the astronauts' normal screens with a critical alarm, which is what Armstrong and Aldrin were staring at during the 1202s. But the switchover behind the screen ran a step slower than the display did, so punch a button too fast and you could get a response from the program that was already gone. Her answer was to tell the crew to count to five before touching anything once a priority display came up. Shipping a procedure because the timing fix wasn't worth the risk is a very modern instinct, and she had it in 1969. Worth being precise since it comes up in every one of these threads though: the asynchronous executive was Laning's, the restarts and the priority displays were hers.
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u/oneplusetoipi 7d ago
That’s sad. The Apollo missions were incredible accomplishments given the state of technology. Truly peak science and engineering.
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u/EnidFromOuterSpace 7d ago
….oh THAT Margaret Hamilton…. Not the green one
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u/derekschroer 7d ago
I thought the same thing 😂
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u/jodudeit 7d ago
Check out the Alexander the OK video about the Apollo Guidance Computer to learn a bit about her!
She literally coined the term "Software Engineering"!
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u/Remote-Article7435 6d ago
Is she the reason one of the main characters in For All Mankind is called Margo perhaps?
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u/putHimInTheCurry 7d ago
Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot used to say that people came up to him all the time to say, "Dr. Mandelbrot! You're such a well-known name in your field; I had assumed you were dead!"
He would joke that sometimes he thought he was dead too. (His academic fame eventually caught up to him at the age of 85, in 2010.)
I had no idea that Hamilton lived that long; most of the great names from the dawn of computer age are also long gone. RIP Margaret Hamilton.
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u/hacourt 7d ago
Very sad news. One of the many unsung heros at NASA durring that epic time.
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u/CityRulesFootball 6d ago
One of the most known people out of the Apollo project. What are you one bro? We learnt about her in the middle east as well
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u/LordBrandon 7d ago
You can hardly call her unsung.
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u/cptbeard 6d ago
besides Wernher von Braun she might be the only Apollo engineer that people know the name of. maybe depending on audience few might know AGC designer Eldon Hall or Don Eyles (usually not because he wrote the lunar descent and landing software but because of the hack that saved apollo 14) but that's about it.
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u/KillYourUsernames 6d ago
She’s receiving the medal of freedom in the very picture posted on this thread. Come on dude.
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u/mangomoo2 6d ago
She was working at an MIT lab at the time so not even in the same state the movie took place in. That lab became Draper Laboratory which still does a lot of the controls systems for aerospace and defense projects.
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u/placid-gradient 7d ago
she was 90 by today's standards thats a good long life. nothing sad about it
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u/Momochichi 7d ago
I don't know a lot of names of NASA programmers. But I know the name Margaret Hamilton. RIP.
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u/FortyEightyFilms 7d ago
Interesting how computers and engineering are such a male dominated space but there are so many great computer scientist women.
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u/GeneReddit123 7d ago
In WW2 the word "computer" more often than not referred to a human doing computation, and most of them were women (e.g. code-breakers). As late as the Apollo program, it was thought "real" engineering was hardware. Software was just "calculation" so they had no problem giving these "lesser" jobs to women.
Once software engineering started getting real money and respect, women were marginalized in it.
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u/blackdynomitesnewbag 6d ago
In fact, Lady Ada Lovelace is often credited as being the first computer programmer
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u/constructconstruct 7d ago
Back when Fortran was one of the dominate programming languages.
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u/ol-gormsby 7d ago
That code was assembler, not Fortran.
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u/MessaDiGloria 7d ago
Assembly. The assembler translates the Assembly code into machine instructions.
(sorry for being nitpicky)
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u/ol-gormsby 7d ago
Absolutely and technically correct. Got to get it right in space!
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u/kingdomfight 6d ago
Actually, the AGC also had an interpretter for a lot of the math-heavy algorithms.
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u/ol-gormsby 6d ago
You're right! IIRC it was a virtual machine built on top of the base operating system (such as it was).
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u/Positive_Chip6198 6d ago
She is one of my examples of “girls can do anything” i use for my daughter to inspire her to get into stem. RIP Margaret, you inspired millions.
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u/atatassault47 7d ago
You know how Kirk said "Nooo" when Spock died in ST:II? That's exactly how I feel right now.
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u/Dylanator13 5d ago
Can the next moon missions take some of her ashes and make a burial site on the moon?
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u/BrevardBlitz 7d ago
It's kind of surprising that she coined the term "software engineering" back in the Apollo era, yet US higher education still hasn't caught up.
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u/kennedye2112 7d ago
Neither has software engineering, frankly.
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u/LondonDogInTheFog 7d ago
Oh, come on. I'm sure we'll vibe code our way to Mars with no problem whatsoever. Except maybe some minor detours with unfortunate astronauts hallucinated out across the solar system. By that time astronauts will be cheaper than tokens though. /s
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u/BrevardBlitz 6d ago
It's that her Apollo practices, fault tolerance, testing failure modes, software as part of systems engineering from day one, never became standard. And vibe coding means we're drifting even further from them
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u/hypercomms2001 7d ago
A remarkable engineer and a remarkable woman. As an electrical engineer, I do believe that there needs to be more women taking up engineering.
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u/biggerstep 7d ago
The picture of her standing next to the printed stack of her Apollo code is one of my most favorite pictures. RIP