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jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
RE: https://journa.host/@mathewi/117402460645423017
damn, a light has gone out of the world
"Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Lauren.
Ms. Hamilton was a young mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, putting her husband through law school by working in a computer lab. When she learned that M.I.T. was designing in-flight computers for the moon mission, she eagerly joined the team.
She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering on the project, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights: one in the command module, which carried the astronauts from Earth, and the second in the lunar module, which set down on the moon’s surface."