10/09/2026
There was no choice but to be pioneers: remembering Margaret Hamilton
A Miniblog by Cassidy, our Administrative Specialist
“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement.” - Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, via MIT News. (https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007)
One of the most iconic images of women in science, in my teen years, was a picture of Margaret Hamilton, taken in 1969, included below (photos from MIT’s archive.) It circled my corner of the internet, both in celebration of Hamilton's work as the Director of the Software Engineering Division for the Apollo exploration program (after starting as their first female programmer, no less), but also so we millennials could marvel at the sight of code existing on the page, instead of floppy disks, CDs, or digital downloads. In the age of computing in which I was raised, it was unthinkable that something as important as software that saved Apollo 11’s mission to the moon from disaster was contained in what looked like a regular pile of books.
It was announced on October 7th, 2026, that Margaret Hamilton passed away at 90 years old. That picture, a woman very nearly physically dwarfed by her work, came back into my social media feeds. I didn’t learn about her in my classrooms, or from my elders. I learned about her existence and work the same way I learned about her death– by being a curious person, trying to learn a new thing every day on the information super-highway.
Hamilton earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1958 from Earlham College in Indiana. She went on to work in the meteorology department at MIT, developing software for predicting weather as a graduate student. Edward Norton Lorenz even cited her contributions in his publications on chaos theory. All of this happened before “software engineer” was even a term…because Margaret Hamilton was the one to coin the term, an “ongoing joke for a long time,” according to Hamilton herself.
Her work with the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project is what opened the door for her at NASA to develop flight software to assist in America’s race to the Moon. Her team tested and wrote all onboard in-flight software for the spacecrafts Command and Lunar Module, as well as Skylab space station later on. She also worked with the systems software. When Apollo 11’s Eagle module was minutes away from landing on the moon, the onboard computer threw a 1202 error. This indicated that a fault in a hardware switch was overloading the computer, which couldn’t handle the landing procedure. Hamilton’s team had designed the software to be priority-driven, so it could shut down unnecessary tasks running in the background. This software saved the mission, and those small steps that were truly giant leaps were taken on the surface of the moon.
Hamilton’s other incredible achievements include, but are not limited to: naming and problem-solving for the "Lauren error” (named for her four year old daughter, who discovered this software error while playing astronaut with simulations as her mother worked long hours); founding the Higher Order Software firm; founding the software company Hamilton Technologies, where the Universal Systems Language was born; being honored with the NASA Exceptional Act Award for scientific technical contributions, the Computer History Museum Fellow Award, the Intrepid Lifetime Achievement Award, an induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and most importantly to this page, a LEGO minifigure of her likeness.
Margaret Hamilton was a scientific icon to those in-the-know, but very well may have passed me by in my formative years if it weren’t for a combination of my constant curiosity, and a single photograph. I encourage you to follow your own curiosity, and read as much as you can about this programming titan.
