Margaret Hamilton
loreprogrammingops culture
The director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, who led the on-board flight software for the Apollo Guidance Computer, and who argued for calling the work engineering at all.
She was the first programmer hired for Apollo at MIT, and the naming fight is part of the contribution: software was not treated as a discipline, and insisting on the term software engineering was a claim that it needed the same rigour as the hardware it flew on. The technical legacy is priority scheduling that sheds load rather than failing: during the lunar descent the computer discarded lower-priority work under overload instead of stopping. That is the ancestor of every system designed to degrade rather than die.
Also known as: hamilton, apollo guidance computer