Margaret Hamilton's Software Lands Apollo 11

The most famous landing in human history was programmed by Margaret Hamilton, who led the team at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory that wrote the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo missions.

During the Apollo 11 landing on July 20, 1969, the guidance computer was overloaded with unneeded tasks and raised alarms. Hamilton's team's design, which ran the most important jobs first and dropped the rest, kept the landing on course. Hamilton even promoted and popularized the term “software engineering” to win the discipline the same standing as hardware.

A photograph of her beside a stack of printed code as tall as she is has become an emblem of the work.