The recent death of Margaret Hamilton merited a pause. Hamilton was the head of the programming team that developed software for the onboard computers for the Apollo missions. One was in the module that transported the astronauts from Earth, the other in the lunar module that landed on the moon.

Hamilton was a young mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when she joined the Apollo team, the first female programmer on the NASA project. She later was given credit for popularizing the term "software engineering" to describe their work, a nomenclature massage that had the effect of putting software coding on a par with hardware design in the world of computing.

There was ample reason, in other words, to pay one's respects to Hamilton. But further grounds were found in a nugget deep in the reporting of her passing. Each of those two 70-pound computers on the Apollo spacecraft that contained Hamilton's mission-critical programming had all of 72 kilobytes of storage memory. An iPhone 18 has 2........

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