Margaret Hamilton, the computer pioneer whose software powered the first moon landing, has died, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced Wednesday. He was 90 years old. In an era before titles like software engineer and computer scientist became commonplace, Hamilton, who died Sept. 30, learned to program under the tutelage of a renowned MIT meteorologist. He continued honing the craft in an MIT lab, writing software that could detect enemy aircraft. When the institute received a contract from NASA to develop flight software aboard Apollo, it jumped at the opportunity. “I was attracted to both the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before. I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired,” she told The Guardian in 2019. In 1969, minutes before the Apollo 11 spacecraft made history by landing on the lunar surface, an onboard computer alarm sounded, signaling an emergency. After making the decision to abort the mission, the spacecraft continued its journey. The software was working just as Hamilton and his team intended. “It quickly became clear that the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but compensating for it by restarting and resetting higher priority tasks. Error detection and recovery mechanisms had come to the rescue,” Hamilton said. Barack Obama referenced the incident when he presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. “Our astronauts didn’t have much time, but luckily they had Margaret Hamilton,” he said. said. Hamilton is survived by his daughter, a son-in-law, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, according to MIT. Reflecting on the mission, in a 2009 interview with MIT News, Hamilton said: “Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; there was no time to be beginners.”
