Margaret Hamilton — Apollo software pioneer

Hamilton in action in an Apollo mockup — Wikimedia

Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist and systems engineer who made significant contributions in the field of software engineering during the 1960s and 1970s. She is most famous for her leadership of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) programming team at NASA.

Hamilton was born in 1936 in Indiana, but later moved to Michigan. There she studied mathematics and earned a BA degree from Earlham College in 1958. A year later, she found herself working at MIT, in the meteorology department writing software for predicting the weather. From there she moved to the MIT Lincoln Lab working on the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project for the USAF, analyzing radar returns to identify unidentified (enemy) aircraft.

Hamilton tells us of the hazing ritual there:

When you came into this organization as a beginner, [they] assign[ed] you this program which nobody was able to figure out or get to run. The person who wrote it took delight that all of his comments were in Greek and Latin... It even printed out its answers in Latin and Greek… I was the first one to get it to work.