Margaret Hamilton led the team at MIT that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program. During the Apollo 11 lunar descent, the computer was overloaded with data from a mistakenly left-on radar switch. Hamilton's priority-based error handling — which she had insisted on over objections that astronauts would never make mistakes — allowed the computer to shed low-priority tasks and focus on landing. Without it, the mission would have been aborted minutes before touchdown. She coined the term \"software engineering\" to give her field the same respect as other engineering disciplines.
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