As Hamilton and her colleagues were programming the Apollo spacecraft, they were also hatching what would become a $400 billion industry.įor 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. As it turned out, of course, software was going to help the world do so much more.
“I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me.”īy mid-1968, more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software, because software was how the US was going to win the race to the moon. Once, after a late-night party, she rushed back to the computer lab to correct a piece of code she’d suddenly realized was flawed. But sometimes the pressure kept Hamilton up at night. It was an exciting time, and the US was depending on the work that she was doing. In 1965, Hamilton became responsible for the onboard flight software on the Apollo computers. Margaret Hamilton inside a mock-up of the Apollo command module.īut as the Apollo project unfolded, the centrality of software in accomplishing the mission started to become clear. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo’s command module computer. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly-and digitally-possible.Īs a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical.
After that, it would be her turn-she wanted a graduate degree in math.īut the Apollo space program came along. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon.
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