MARGARET HAMILTON’S APOLLO CODE

By Maia Weinstock  MIT News Office 2016

A brief history of the famous 1969 photo of the software that sent humans to the Moon.

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. For her work during this period, Hamilton has been credited with popularizing the concept of software engineering. FOR MORE