Margaret Hamilton: ‘They worried that the men might rebel. They didn’t’
The trailblazing computer scientist talks about being in charge of the software for the 1969 Apollo moon landing
Computer pioneer Margaret Hamilton was critical to landing astronauts on the moon for the first time on 20 July 1969 and returning them safely a few days later. The young Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer programmer and working mother led the team that created the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions, including Apollo 11. The computer system was the most sophisticated of its day. Her rigorous approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions. "She symbolises that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space," said President Barack Obama in 2016 when he awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award. In 2017, she was one of a handful of Nasa women to be immortalised as a Lego figurine.On the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, Hamilton, 82, looks back on her trailblazing work in computing.
What got you into software engineering? There were no computer science degrees when you were starting out"
I got married in 1958, just after I graduated in math with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College [in Indiana]. We both had assistantships to attend graduate school - me in abstract math and my husband in chemistry - but in the meantime I had taught high school for a year, we had my daughter, and my husband decided he wanted to go to law school at Harvard. I found a job to support our family at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was in the laboratory of Prof Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, working on a system to predict weather. He was asking for math majors. To take care of our daughter, we hired a babysitter. Here I learned what a computer was and how to write software. Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines; instead, programmers learned on the job. Lorenz's love for software experimentation was contagious, and I caught the bug.