Cracking the Code

“She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering on the project, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights: one in the command module, which carried the astronauts from Earth, and the second in the lunar module, which set down on the moon’s surface. Ms. Hamilton, who would bring her young daughter to work on weekends and evenings, is credited with popularizing the term ‘software engineering’ to describe the complexity of the work her team did, thus elevating software coding to a status equal to hardware design.” Margaret Hamilton, The Woman Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions Has Died.

+ “Long before software engineering became a boys’ club — the exclusive domain of tech bros and a mythical force that threatens to either transform the world or snuff it out — it was just Margaret’s thing. ‘There goes Margaret with her software engineering,’ Margaret Hamilton recalled being ribbed by her colleagues in the 1960s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Instrumentation Laboratory.” Before Computer Science Became a Boys’ Club, Margaret Hamilton Wrote the Code.