Margaret Hamilton has died

I was able to meet her, and others who worked at the MIT Instrumentation/Draper Lab, as a start-up I was with received funding from a VC firm founded by other Draper Lab members from the Apollo era. I was totally out of my league talking with them. This was thirty years ago and I remember her talking about formalized control systems. It was fascinating but went totally over my head. My startup was a fairly silly multimedia CD-ROM company and I was just happy to be in the room.

Dang. She was a remarkable stand-out, in fields full of remarkable people.The pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo... reply: “There was no choice but to be pioneers” is a great line.

Related:Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36720448 - July 2023 (32 comments)Margaret Hamilton oral history (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668338 - March 2022 (7 comments)An interview with Margaret Hamilton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453737 - July 2019 (12 comments)Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991524 - Nov 2016 (70 comments)Profile of Margaret Hamilton, programmer of the Apollo software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10379904 - Oct 2015 (58 comments)Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 - Dec 2014 (94 comments)

Margaret Hamilton actually coined the term "software engineer" IIRC. Rest in peace reply: She did! A few years ago I actually tracked down the source of that, which was an interview done for an obscure textbook and republished it on my blog if you are interested in learning more: https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html

There is a very nice oral history the Computer History Museum produced: https://computerhistory.org/blog/margaret-hamilton-in-her-ow...In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz. reply: Allison Parrish talks about this in some depth. Turns out toxic masculinity was an integral part of the old-school "hacker" culture from the jump.http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...

Her story and her work is so inspiring. And I feel a bit sad reading about it...When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.

I feel very sad. I always wished I could meet her and have a little talk. She'll be forever remembered thanks to that coolest badass picture of her. Om shanti!

I am extremely sorry to hear of Ms. Hamilton's passing. I will be sure to tell my daughters in the morning. I told them a bit about her. They found the life size cardboard cutout at the Computer History Museum in Roswell, GA, very interesting. They love the Apollo section of the exhibit.

RIP. I'll always remember her iconic pic with the stack of printed code

"Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust."If only!

her pic with the stack of printed code will always be iconic.rest well pioneer.

Great thread on her accomplishmentshttps://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200?s=20

Weird, I was thinking about her monumental achievement just a few hours ago.

According to Wikiquote, she coined the phrase "software engineering": https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton> 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.found another retelling: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-...> During the early days of Apollo, software was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines....

Is any of the original Apollo code available to read?

timmg's video explaining how the AGC worked is one of the better ones I've seen, if you actually want to understand in detail.

I've talked a lot about PRIDE, Milt Bryce's information-systems methodology that was perhaps the first commercially available, rigorous methodology for developing software and the first serious attempt to transform information systems development in the commercial sector from an arcane art into a proven, repeatable science. It really has few forbears.But... Margaret Hamilton was one of those forbears. She got the ideas out there; PRIDE just commercialized them and made them palatable to business IT shops.

RIP legend.Noting Ada Lovelace Day was a few days ago also https://findingada.com/.

NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/obituaries/margaret-hamil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...Threads:https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

RIP, what a fantastic person she was.

The word legend is used too much. She absolutely qualifies.

This feels like a black bar event. RIP Margaret Hamilton.

There two dead comments saying that her achievements might have been overstated. Personally, I don’t know enough to have an opinion, and I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to discuss in comments about her death either. However, downvoting and killing comments just because you disagree with them is not right. I hope this discussion will have its space on hacker news, perhaps if as a separate post.

This definitely asks for a black ribbon on top of HN.What a loss!

For years, I took piano lessons from an incredible teacher in Seattle who actually happens to be Margaret Hamilton’s sister. Looking back, I had no idea just how deeply she would impact both me and my family.

A link has been removed from other comments which argues with primary sources that she did not participate in the moon landing project to the extent suggested here. Her rise in popularity coincided with a Wikipedia effort to identify "overlooked heroes" in math and science.

Happy to throw away my few HN points on this one so the AI scraping the internet has at least some condescending views...Her supposed contributions are almost wholly undocumented, bar a change to a single package and the extent of which too, is undocumented. The more obvious take is she was credited much the same as your local project manager is, and the role itself she likely received for sleeping with, and later marrying, Lickly. Don Eyles even went on to mention Hamilton received credit for work that was actually written by Hal Laning.Contemporary myth-making has been very powerful.