http://www.vox.com/2015/5/30/8689481/margaret-hamilton-apollo-software
Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass '60s programmer who saved the moon landing
Happy moon landing day! July 20, 2015 marks the 46th anniversary of Apollo 11's arrival on the moon. The lunar lander holding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down at 4:18 PM eastern, and Armstrong became the first human in history to walk on the lunar surface at 10:56 PM.
Huge amounts of aeronautical and hardware engineering effort went into the Apollo program from its birth in 1961 to its completion in 1972, as NASA and its partners designed the Saturn V rocket to get astronauts out of Earth's orbit, the command/service modules that orbited the moon, and the lunar modules that actually landed on the moon. But Apollo was also a major software project. Astronauts used theApollo Guidance Computer, which was placed in both the command module and the lunar module, for navigation assistance and to control the spacecraft, and someone needed to program it.
The software for the guidance computer was written by a team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Draper Laboratory), headed up by Margaret Hamilton. Here's an amazing picture of her next to the code she and her colleagues wrote for the Apollo 11 guidance computer that made the moon landing possible:
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Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass '60s programmer who saved the moon landing
Happy moon landing day! July 20, 2015 marks the 46th anniversary of Apollo 11's arrival on the moon. The lunar lander holding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down at 4:18 PM eastern, and Armstrong became the first human in history to walk on the lunar surface at 10:56 PM.
Huge amounts of aeronautical and hardware engineering effort went into the Apollo program from its birth in 1961 to its completion in 1972, as NASA and its partners designed the Saturn V rocket to get astronauts out of Earth's orbit, the command/service modules that orbited the moon, and the lunar modules that actually landed on the moon. But Apollo was also a major software project. Astronauts used theApollo Guidance Computer, which was placed in both the command module and the lunar module, for navigation assistance and to control the spacecraft, and someone needed to program it.
The software for the guidance computer was written by a team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Draper Laboratory), headed up by Margaret Hamilton. Here's an amazing picture of her next to the code she and her colleagues wrote for the Apollo 11 guidance computer that made the moon landing possible:
