When man ( or more specifically , aman ) stepped metrical foot on the airfoil of the Moon on July 20 , 1969 , software was a relatively new development . In fact , the Moon charge was one of the first time this kind of technology was used in such a fundamental — not to mention mellow - stakes — manner . History was being written that day , and a char named Margaret Hamilton had author the computer code that made it potential .
Hamilton was born in 1936 , and received a B.A. in mathematics from Earlham College . She instruct herself to program before becoming the director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory , which developed package for the NASAApollo program .
In the photo below , Hamilton abide with printout of the computer code for the Apollo Guidance Computer — the same code that serve us reach the Moon — which was developed by the team that she direct , and much of which she write herself . This crack was taken during theApollo 11mission , when Hamilton was 33 years old . Her code ran in one of the first everchip - based computers , which had only 64 KB of memory .
Hamilton , who was among the first women to join the domain of software package growing , was a New day pioneer . She is even credit with coining the termsoftware engineering . For her contribution to the area , Hamilton receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association of Women in Computing in 1986 , the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003 , and the Presidential Medal of Freedom ( America ’s highest civilian honour ) in 2016 .
In 2014 , Hamilton was interviewed byEl Paísabout the aid she has received from the circulation of her photo online . She explained :
Hamiltonalso wrotethat the Apollo 11 mission had the " most exciting , memorable here and now on the Apollo task , " but that Apollo 8 was a close second gear .
This story has been updated for 2019 .
