Janine Liberty (Hacker News, NASA, NYT, WSJ):

Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.

A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline.

[…]

Moments before the Eagle module was set to land on the lunar surface, the onboard computer raised the alarm. It had detected a 1202 error: The computer was overloaded due to a fault in a hardware switch, and it was possible the system would not be able to handle the complex landing procedure.

But Hamilton and her team had engineered priority-driven software, able to shut down unnecessary background tasks in order to prioritize mission-critical tasks. Houston trusted Hamilton’s software and allowed the mission to proceed, and two men walked on the moon for the first time.

Dave DeGraw:

The following is an excerpt from a textbook called Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities, 7th Edition ISBN 0-13-444872-3

At the time of publishing, the Wikipedia page for Margaret Hamilton has an important quote about the origin of the term “software engineering”. I was moved by this and wanted to add it to my /quotes page, but needed to verify the source of the quote. I was bothered that the source came from an interview given for an out-of-print textbook that as far as I can tell is unavailable to legally obtain. The interview is also not published in later editions of the book.

Fortunately, I was able to find the complete interview and I am publishing that excerpt here under fair use doctrine for educational, archival, and personal informational purposes only.

The Computer History Museum has an article and a full oral history.

Previously:

• Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
• Testing the Apollo Spacecraft
• The Apollo Guidance Computer
• Margaret Hamilton and Apollo 11
• That Would Never Happen

Craft History Interview Programming Rest in Peace Video