‘When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before’ — Quote of the day by NASA’s former software director Margaret Hamilton on the birth of software engineering | Daily Reports Online
The computing industry was once unrecognizable from the one we see today, with the idea of discipline centered around writing code treated as some kind of fantasy. That was before industry pioneer Margaret Hamilton coined the term while leading the flight software team for NASA’s Apollo space program in the 1960s.
“When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas.”
Pioneering an industry
Hamilton was describing the process by which she coined the term “software engineering” and, by doing so, defined an entire computer science discipline, in an interview.
Quote of the day
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Rather than an interview for any media outlet, the transcript for this interview appeared in the first edition of the computer science textbook ‘Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities’ by Lawrence Snyder and Ray Laura Henry.
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She recalled during this conversation a particularly memorable moment in which a highly respected hardware guru explained to everyone in the meeting that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline – just like hardware. That’s because she and her colleagues had earned the respect of others in the room as being in an engineering field in their own right.
Teething issues
Before Hamilton coined the term and defined many of the processes and best practices that drove the software achievements at NASA during the Apollo mission, the approach to computing was in a state of disarray.
People, at the time, valued physical hardware and the components fitted underneath far more than the code that nobody could see. Programming, in a sense, wasn’t seen as a real science until Hamilton came along.
During her time at NASA, she created vital on-board flight software, with a particular highlight being her error-detection-and-recovery system. Her contributions were immortalized in the 2022 short film ‘To Go to the Moon’, in which she was portrayed by Dominque Roberts.
This attitude led to a software crisis in the 1960s through the 1980s, with many projects running over budget and schedule and with the software that was published containing critical bugs, with costly consequences. This was the direct impact of a lack of professionalization in the field.
