Margaret Hamilton Biography
Margaret Hamilton (Margaret Heafield Hamilton) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner who is credited with coining the term “software engineering”.
Hamilton was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program and in 1986 she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hamilton Technologies, Inc. was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on Margaret’s paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. She published 130 papers, reports and proceedings about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved.
She was on November 22, 2016, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Barack Obama for her work leading the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions.
Margaret Hamilton Age
Hamilton is 83 years old as of 2019. She was born on August 17, 1936.
Margaret Hamilton Apollo
The Apollo Guidance Computer together with the onboard flight software averted an abort of the landing on the Moon in one of the critical moments of the Apollo 11 mission.
About three minutes before the Lunar lander reached the Moon’s surface, several computer alarms were triggered and the computer was overloaded with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power supplied to the lander’s rendezvous radar. The alarms indicated that the computer could not complete all of its tasks in real-time and had to postpone some of them.
Hamilton and her team used The asynchronous executive designed by J. Halcombe to develop asynchronous flight software.
Her priority alarm display interrupted the astronauts’ normal displays to warn them that there was an emergency “giving the astronauts a go/no go decision (to land or not to land)”. A NASA computer engineer in mission control by the name Jack Garman recognized the meaning of the errors that were presented to the astronauts by the priority displays and shouted, “Go, go!” And on they went.
Margaret wrote of the incident saying:
“The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I’m overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I’m going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing … Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software’s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones … If the computer hadn’t recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.”
Margaret Hamilton NASA | Margaret Hamilton Code
Margaret joined the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT, which at the time was working on the Apollo space mission. She would later lead a team credited with developing the software for Apollo and Skylab. Her team was responsible for developing in-flight software, which included algorithms designed by various senior scientists for the Apollo command module, lunar lander, and the subsequent Skylab. Also, another part of her team designed and developed the systems software which included the error detection and recovery software such as restarts and the Display Interface Routines which she designed and developed.
Margaret worked to gain hands-on experience during a time when computer science courses were uncommon and software engineering courses did not exist. Margaret’s areas of expertise include systems design and software development, process modeling and enterprise, formal systems modeling languages, development paradigm, system-oriented objects for systems modeling and development, methods for maximizing software reliability and reuse, automated life-cycle environments, and domain analysis.
She is also an expert incorrectness by built-in language properties, open-architecture techniques for robust systems, full life-cycle automation, quality assurance, seamless integration, error detection and recovery techniques, man-machine interface systems, operating systems, end-to-end testing techniques, and life-cycle management techniques.
Margaret Hamilton Code
While at MIT, Hamilton assisted in the creation of the core principles in computer programming as she worked with her colleagues in writing code for the world’s first portable computer”.
Margaret Hamilton Net Worth
The exact details of Margaret’s net worth are not known.
Margaret Hamilton Death
Margaret is still alive and well.
Margaret Hamilton Quotes
- Computer science and software engineering were not yet coursed to be taught (or disciplines to be named). These were pioneering times. Learning was by “being” and “doing” on the job; as more people came on board, the more I became an “expert” and rose up through the ranks.”
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