The Woman Who Sent Man to the Moon.

If anyone ever asks you about the first person on the moon, what would you say? Depending on where you’re from, of course, it can be one of three possibilities – Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin or Michael Collins in NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

This is the coding.
ENTIRELY handwritten.

What with Neil Armstrong’s hugely famous speech and the hundreds of conspiracy theories surrounding the first man on the moon, there was no apparent space (get it?) for the discussion of women.

Enter Margaret Hamilton.

Hamilton earned her B.A in mathematics and shortly after got married. She taught high school maths and French to allow her husband to finish studying at university. In 1958, she moved to Boston, with the intention to study abstract mathematics at Brandeis University. She got a job, however, at MIT - to develop software for predicting the weather.

Margaret Hamilton is a (bad-ass) self-taught computer software engineer. She taught herself the things that people go to university and spend thousands to learn. At the time, however, software engineering was neither a recognised term nor respectable profession. It was a vocation deemed effeminate like typing or filing. Hamilton’s phrase ‘software’ became recognised after she gained legitimacy for her work. She is the pioneer for computer engineering - completely subverting the norm of the time where women were not seen as equals in the scientific fields. She revolutionised the world of computing technology and set in motion the term 'software' and all of the developments that go with the term. 

She became director of the Software Engineering Division of MIT – which developed software for the NASA Apollo programs. Hamilton supervised a team of 100 engineers, mathematicians, programmers and technical writers.

Her team developed the code for the Apollo Guidance Computer.

It had 64 kilobytes of memory (a modern mobile phone apparently has 30,000x more memory than that) and was one of the first chip-based computers.

Now, during the research process of this post, I read a lot of computer jargon. There was stuff about programming and coding and words that I didn't even think existed. That both proves how clueless I am about anything computer-related and how utterly SMART Hamilton is.

In Layman’s terms, Hamilton understood that the computer could be overloaded. She and her team wrote a program that clarified the order in which the computer would do the different things it was made to do at the same time. Hamilton and her team created a feature crucial to the moon landing called the ‘asynchronous executive.’ This basically meant that the computer would be able to recognise when it was close to overloading and sojourn the low-priority tasks.

When the three men were about to land on the moon, something went wrong. All astronauts have a list – essentially a checklist – which instructs them on what action to take next. The checklist had instructed the men to activate the radar system that would be used for taking off from the moon – not for landing. The radar began sending the computer masses of information based on suspected malfunction, threatening to overload its tiny mainframe and memory. If the guidance computer overloaded, the mission would have to be aborted.

The asynchronous executive saved the landing.

Margaret Hamilton and her team saved the landing.

Her, and her team's, hundreds upon hundreds of hours of hard work manifested itself in the most almighty of manners. The indubitable fact of the matter is that without this woman, there would have been no man on the moon.

Hamilton’s incredible work, however, was not formally recognised until over thirty years later. THIRTY years. And still, if I was to have asked you before this article if you had any idea of who Margaret Hamilton is and her outstanding effect on the first mission to the moon was, what would you have said?

It is no fault of yours, or mine. It is the fault of the older societies. But we are the evolution. This generational improvement and recognition of women like Hamilton – who were so unjustly ignored by their ridiculous patriarchal society – is what will change the world.

This is an ode to you, Margaret Hamilton, for your contributions to the development of computing technology, for your fantastic mind, for your tireless efforts and for your actions towards the achievement of parity. 

Let us celebrate your intelligence, your contribution, your science. Your mind. 

We salute you, Margaret Hamilton, and thank you: the woman who sent man to the moon.