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According to MIT News, Margaret Hamilton died at the age of 90. "A profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program". This famous photo 🔽 inspired the For All Mankind character Margo Madison.

bryan newbold@bnewbold.net

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

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“I decided that [Margaret Hamilton] would be one of our characters,” Moore says. “I never even looked into who she was, but there was something inspiring about this young woman working at NASA at that time.” She inspired the character, but the two brilliant women experienced very different fates.

web.archive.orgReview: <em>For All Mankind</em> rewrites history with a prolonged space raceApple’s new series imagines the political and social implications of a Soviet victory in the race to the Moon.

"A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO."

news.mit.eduMargaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.

What as shame the companies writing the AI software now destroying the world didn't learn - or wilfully ignored - Hamilton's lessons in writing code that detects and prevents undesirable outcomes. The approach now is to just let the code loose and get other people to clean up the mess afterwards.

Not enough movies and shows (as in none) have been made to tell her story and the story of so many of the women "computers" who made Apollo possible. Way better people to admire from NASA than war criminals like von Braun.

Profound respect for this woman, but the first thing that came to mind was Margaret Hamilton who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Sorry, I’m old enough to know that….

My wife's initial reaction as well. When I said, "no, the Apollo developer," she responded with "....ohhh!" My wife's an old-school COBOL dev, so that hit.