In my post about Margaret Hamilton, I wrote:

Hamilton insisted on calling the still-nascent field “software engineering” to describe the exacting development process she and her team were pioneering to ensure the safety of those astronauts.

That’s accurate as far as it goes, but woefully incomplete. Hamilton offered a far more extensive explanation in an interview published in an out-of-print textbook; Wikipedia quotes a portion of that interview, but Dave DeGraw tracked down the full interview. In it, Hamilton provides much-needed context behind her desire to call her field “software engineering.” Here’s the section that leads into the Wikipedia quote:

Requirements engineers and software engineers necessarily became interchangeable, as did their life-cycle phases— suggesting that a system is a system, no matter from which discipline things had originated. From this perspective, system design issues became one and the same as software engineering design issues. Yet, the systems-software part of the flight software was in a world all of its own!

“What is the difference,” I asked, “between what they are doing and what we are doing?” Knowing this, and the lack of understanding by many of what it took to create real world software-based systems and the part our software played within these systems, I wanted to give our software “legitimacy” so that it (and those building it) would be given its due respect; and, as a result I began to call what we were doing “software engineering” to distinguish it from other kinds of engineering; yet, treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process.

The whole interview is fascinating.

(Via MJ Tsai.)