Margaret Hamilton

Oral History of Margaret Hamilton

Three hours with the Computer History Museum, told in her own words. She traces her path from writing weather-prediction software for Edward Lorenz at MIT, to the SAGE air-defense system at Lincoln Laboratory, to Apollo at Draper. There is the "Lauren bug": her four-year-old daughter crashed a simulator by selecting the pre-launch program mid-flight. Hamilton argued for a fix and was overruled, because "the astronauts would never ever make a mistake," and on Apollo 8 they made exactly that one. Then the 1201 and 1202 priority displays she had personally written, which came up just before the Apollo 11 landing while the software shed lower-priority work and carried on. She tells how "software engineering" began as a joke among the hardware engineers until one of them stood up and called it engineering, and she ends with the philosophy she built a company on: development "before the fact," preventative rather than restorative.