Breaking Barriers to the Moon and Back:
How Margaret Hamilton's Software Sent
Men to the Moon
As a Programmer
He was asking for math majors. To take care of our daughter, we hired a babysitter. Here I learned what a computer was and how to write software. Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines; instead, programmers learned on the job. Lorenz’s love for software experimentation was contagious, and I caught the bug."
-Margaret Hamilton
At MIT, Hamilton worked on weather prediction software for Professor Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist and mathematician. Soon, Hamilton moved to MIT’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program, which located enemy aircraft for the US Air Force.
In 1964, three years after NASA contracted MIT for Project Apollo, two managers offered Hamilton a job on the same day. Not wanting to offend either, she made them flip a coin. The winner hired her. At this point, Hamilton had not created the term ‘software engineer,’ so she was referred to as a programmer.
Apollo Project Logo. NASA. No date