The photo is iconic: A young woman stands next to almost 20 bound books, the stack of books nearly as tall as her (though she appears to have a slight heel in the shoes complementing her very 1960s shift dress). Learn about who she was in this edition of Pioneers in Tech.
The woman is Margaret Hamilton, who directed the Software Engineering Division of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory. Her team was responsible for the Apollo On-Board Flight Software that made it possible for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. The team wrote the code in a specialized version of an assembly programming language. The program stored data in “rope memory”—wire threads and tiny magnetic cores. Those who encoded the “rope memory” were known as “rope mothers” whether male or female.
In 2009, in commemoration of Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary, Hamilton shared her memories with MIT News: “I was … listening to the conversations between the astronauts and Mission Control when all of a sudden the normal mission sequences were interrupted by priority displays of 1201 and 1202 alarms, giving the astronauts a go/no go decision (to land or not to land). … What could possibly trigger these alarms at this most crucial time? It quickly became clear that the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it. With only minutes to spare, they decided to go for the landing… The rest is history.”
Apollo 11: one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind—and one giant stack of paper.
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Photo: arte.inteligente1 / Shutterstock
