“Software Engineering”

Margaret Hamilton: It helps to know what it was like back then for those of us building the Apollo on-board flight software. During the early days of Apollo, software was treated like a stepchild; it was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Considered a mysterious “black box”, it was regarded by many as an art, not a science. To me it was both. Understanding the subtleties of developing real-time asynchronous flight software was left up to the flight software’s systems- software experts. Having this kind of responsibility resulted in our creating a “field”, since there was no school at the time to learn “software engineering”. This necessitated our creating methods, standards, rules and tools for developing the flight software. We were always looking for new ways to prevent errors. When answers could not be found, we had to invent them as we went along. ~ Links: Interview with Margaret H. Hamilton, excerpt from Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts,…