Happy Birthday Margaret Hamilton! The computer scientist who helped make the Apollo 11 Moon landing possible turns 80 today.
Hamilton earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and, at age 24, got a job at MIT as a programmer to develop meteorology software. In 1961 MIT was contracted by NASA to develop Apollo’s guidance system, and four years later Hamilton was put in charge of the software for navigation and lunar landing guidance. For Hamilton, programming meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards, which would be processed overnight in batches on a giant Honeywell mainframe computer that simulated the Apollo lander’s work. Her hard work paid off as the Eagle lander descended toward the Moon’s surface on 20 July 1969. The Apollo computer suddenly became overwhelmed, tasked with performing calculations unnecessary for the landing. But Hamilton and her team had prepared for such a possibility, coding in instructions that enabled the computer to correctly prioritize the most important commands.
Hamilton stayed on at MIT to head the software programming for Apollo and Skylab. Now an independent computer scientist, she described in 2009 her contributions to the Apollo software — which last month was added in its entirety to the code-sharing site GitHub: “From my own perspective, the software experience itself (designing it, developing it, evolving it, watching it perform and learning from it for future systems) was at least as exciting as the events surrounding the mission… There was no second chance. We knew that. We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”
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