Margaret Hamilton is one of the first computer software programmers. She earned a BA in mathematics in 1958 and intended to enter graduate school but instead began working at MIT as a programmer. Hamilton was the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT and the first female programmer in the project. She was responsible for the team writing and testing all on board in flight software for the Apollo spacecraft’s Command and Lunar Module. Hamilton concentrated on software to detect system errors and to recover information in a computer crash. Both those elements were crucial during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, which took U.S. astronauts to the Moon. Hamilton left MIT in the mid-1970s to work in the private sector, founding two software companies. In 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions.
