Software engineer Margaret Hamilton dies at age 90

Margaret Hamilton, a pioneering computer scientist who helped put humans on the moon, has died at the age of 90.

Hamilton led the team that wrote the flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer in the 1960s. Her most important contribution was a design that allowed the computer to focus on its most critical tasks when it became overloaded. During the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, warning alarms showed the system was overloaded, but her software kept working on the landing. The mission succeeded.

At its largest, her software team had more than 400 people. She later founded her own technology company in 1986. Hamilton is widely credited with creating the field of software engineering as a formal discipline.