Margaret Hamilton

Hamilton led the group at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory that wrote the code for the Apollo Guidance Computer. Her insistence on robust error handling proved decisive during the 1969 Moon landing: the computer raised overload alarms during descent, and the priority scheme she had designed meant the system shed lower-priority tasks instead of crashing.

She introduced the phrase software engineering at a time when programming was regarded as subordinate to real engineering. The well-known photograph of her standing beside a stack of paper as tall as she is shows the printed Apollo source code.