margaret hamilton
(foldoc) | Margaret Hamilton
(born 1936-08-17) A computer scientist, {systems
engineer} and business owner, credited with coining the term
software engineering.
Margaret Hamilton published over 130 papers, proceedings and
reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she
has been involved.
In 1965 she became Director of Software Programming at MIT's
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Director of the Software
Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory,
which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space
program.
At NASA, Hamilton pioneered the Apollo on-board guidance
software that navigated to and landed on the Moon and formed the
basis for software used in later missions. At the time,
programming was a hands-on, engineering descipline; computer
science and software engineering barely existed.
Hamilton produced innovations in system design and software
development, enterprise and process modelling, development
paradigms, formal systems modelling languages, system-oriented
objects for systems modelling and development, {automated
life-cycle environments}, software reliability, {software
reuse}, domain analysis, correctness by built-in language
properties, open architecture techniques for robust systems, full
life-cycle automation, quality assurance, {seamless
integration}, error detection and recovery, {man-machine
interface} systems, operating systems, end-to-end testing and
life-cycle management.
She developed concepts of asynchronous software, {priority
scheduling} and Human-in-the-loop decision capability, which
became the foundation for modern, ultra-reliable software design.
The Apollo 11 moon landing would have aborted when spurious data
threatened to overload the computer, but thanks to the innovative
asynchronous, priority based scheduling, it eliminated the
unnecessary processing and completed the landing successfully.
In 1986, she founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc., developed
around the Universal Systems Language and her systems and
software design paradigm of Development Before the Fact
(DBTF).
(2015-03-08)
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