Margaret Hamilton and Two Kinds of Intent

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In responding to a recent security problem I had to consider the idea of intent in computer software, so I looked to see what Margaret Hamilton ↗ has to say. Hamilton proved her ideas spectacularly during the first Apollo moon landing in 1969. A hardware failure generated unexpected errors ↗ , but the software coped by running the highest-priority tasks despite the barrage of errors and prevented an abort just seconds before landing on the surfae. I eventually found an article in a 1994 copy of Electronic Design magazine which explains her Development Before the Fact philosophy. After discussion with the current magazine editor, I was able to clean up the scanned text and document Hamilton’s precience.

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Margaret Hamilton and Two Kinds of Intent