Margaret Hamilton - First female programmer for Apollo at M.I.T.

Margaret Hamilton: 17 August 1936 to 30 September 2026. Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions, Has Died - The New York Times

People are confused about the fact that women where very much in computing in the early days. That is because at one time "computer" was a job description, akin to bookkeeper, and women where involved, as it wasn't considered manly work.

Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died on Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.

The picture to the right, is from NASA. It shows Hamilton standing next to the printed code in 1969.

She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering on the project, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights: one in the command module, which carried the astronauts from Earth, and the second in the lunar module, which set down on the moon’s surface.

And that code reflects the personality of designers. The routine that controls Master Ignition for the Command Module is headed by a comment that says...

BURN. BABY. BURN. -- MASTER IGNITION ROUTINE

The hat tip for this sad news goes to The Silicon Graybeard: The most important SW engineer that most people don't know passes.

By 1968 Hamilton was "assistant director in charge" of the Command and Service module software. She thought it would be a good addition to incorporate a failsafe into the system software’s “priority display” interface routines, should the onboard guidance computer become overloaded with more tasks than it could handle in real time.

You can find my archive post on How Women Were Pushed Out of the Tech Industry at that link.