This piece blew my mind. I had no idea that one of the key pioneers of modern software and coding was a working mom from the 1960s! The fact that Margaret Hamilton was leading an MIT team writing the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions while also bringing her daughter to work makes her such an icon.
Just let that sink in for a moment. At a time when women were expected to stay home and support their husband’s career, Hamilton was leading an MIT team writing the critical onboard flight software that allowed NASA to accomplish the seemingly impossible – landing astronauts on the lunar surface and returning them safely.
What makes it even more incredible is that she was doing this boundary-pushing work while also bringing her young daughter to the lab. Little Lauren was napping under mommy’s desk as Hamilton and her team were inventing core programming concepts like error prioritisation and asynchronous processing from scratch. Techniques that are still fundamental today!
The part about the “Little Old Ladies” literally weaving the software into indestructible copper wires is so fascinating. It’s a stark contrast to our current world of seamless cloud computing and automatic updates. But it captures the blind ambition and faith in human ingenuity that powered that era’s space race.
My favorite anecdote from the reading though is Hamilton advocating to add extra fault protection to the code because her daughter had exposed a flaw in the simulator – and NASA dismissing it as impossible. Then that exact scenario happening on the critical Apollo 8 mission and Hamilton’s protocol saving the day! What foresight.
Stories like this are such great reminders that the technological marvels we now take for granted were once radical frontiers explored by true visionaries and pioneers like Hamilton. At a time when the concept of “software” was barely understood, she had the brilliance to blaze that trail through the unknown and invent an entirely new discipline.
This was such an inspiring read!!