The Apollo 11 went down in history back in 1969, when it carried the first human beings to make it to the moon. But there was one other scientist involved in the project who is largely unknown to the general public to this day.
Margaret Hamilton was a programmer at MIT in the 1960's, in a field that was largely dominated by men. In fact, women in "highly technical" jobs were looked down upon, and generally considered less efficient than their male counterparts. But Hamilton proved she was more than capable, when she joined the Apollo space program.
At the time, the budget for the program didn't even include the word software, this being a decade before there was a Microsoft. But as the project carried on, Hamilton was eventually brought onto the team and in 1965 put in charge of programming the onboard flight systems on the Apollo 11.
In those days, programming was nowhere near what we have today. Coding the software meant hours spent punching stacks of cards that would eventually be literally hardwired into the flight computer. The cards would be sent to a team of seamstresses who would turn them into wire systems; a copper wire through a magnetic ring signifying a 1 in binary, and an empty hole for a 0.
And all that software was what gave the Apollo 11 its' fly-by-wire aka autopilot system, decades before it would be standard fare in airline flights, and it was done with a paltry amount of available memory.
Margaret Hamilton was the pioneer of a field that came to be known as software engineering, and she did most of it as her four-year-old daughter slept on the office couch next to her.
