Margaret Hamilton
Her Code Got Humans on the Moon
1969: Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project
Timeline
- 1936: Born in Indiana, US
- 1961: Worked on the SAGE project, tracking weather using computer systems
- 1969: Became the lead developer of the in-flight software for Apollo and Skylab
- 1976: Started Higher Order Software company
- 2016: Received Presidential Medal of Freedom
During the early days of Apollo, software was treated like a stepchild; it was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. ... Having this kind of responsibility resulted in our creating a “field”, since there was no school at the time to learn “software engineering". This necessitated our creating methods, standards, rules and tools for developing the flight software