Above is an image of Margaret Hamilton in a lunar lander. Over half a century ago, MIT played a critical role in the development of the flight software for NASA’s Apollo program, which landed humans on the Moon for the first time in 1969. One of the many contributors to this effort was Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist who led the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which in 1961 contracted with NASA to develop the Apollo program’s guidance system.
This image is of Margaret Hamilton standing next to all of the code she wrote for the lunar lander for Apollo 11.
This is an image of the copper wires that they would write the code with. They used copper wires back in the day to write the code because copper can send data back an forth.
This is a picture of her in her later years of working. She is threading the copper wire through so the computer can read the code.