Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, and was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instruction Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. Hamilton coined the term "software engineering".

Hamilton in 1969, standing next to listings of the software she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project.

Quotes

• In the early days of this project, software was treated like an adopted child and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering, and was thought of as art and magic, not science. I have always believed that art and science were involved in its creation, but at the time most people thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to legitimize software so that both software engineering and those who built it would receive the respect they deserved, so I began using the term “software engineering” to differentiate it from hardware and other forms of engineering. When I first started using these words, they were considered funny. It was a running joke for a long time. They liked to make fun of my radical ideas. Software eventually earned the same respect as any other discipline.

• Translated from "Margaret Hamilton, la pionera de la programación que llevó el Apolo a la Luna (Margaret Hamilton, the programming pioneer who took Apollo to the Moon)". Interview by Jaime Rubio Hancock, published online at: Verne – El País, December 25, 2014.