A Giant Step for Womenkind
Almost everyone has heard of Project Apollo, the first manned spaceflight which landed on the moon. What any people don’t know, is the lead software engineer was Margaret Hamilton, a woman.
It was not uncommon for women of that time to be programmers because no hard, physical work had to be done. The woman would just need to punch in the numbers to produce a calculation. The fact that they designed the calculations themselves was overlooked and they were given very little credit for their work.
Margaret Hamilton was only 31 when she wrote or oversaw much of the code for the Apollo guidance system. She had never gone to school for programming but taught herself this skill. Because of her codes Apollo had the ability to not only navigate to the moon, but also land. Without this software, Neil Armstrong wouldn't have been able to take that “giant step for mankind.”
In 1986 she was honored for her contributions with the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award and the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003.
Margaret Hamilton is now the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. She continues to contribute to the field of engineering and programming constantly improving her software and developing ideas for the future.
Sources:
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/software-woman-heart-lunar-triumph/
http://threefingeredfox.net/?p=143
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2014/12/10/margaret-hamilton-developed-on-board-flight-software-for-the-apollo-space-program-coined-term-software-engineering/
