Margaret Hamilton was the lead software engineer for Project Apollo.
It had long been tradition that operating calculating machines was
“women’s work”; it was thought to be just keypunching, like typing.
Women programmed and operated the punchcard machines to produce
calculations for the Manhattan Project. Despite the tendency of the
project physicists to minimize their contribution, this was demanding
work, much more than just moving cards from slot to slot, they were
usually given requirements from the tech people, but often designed the
approach and set up the calculations themselves.
Margaret Hamilton earned her BA in math from Earlham College, but
obviously learned about programming on the job, there was no other way.
In the photo above, she is standing in front of the printouts of the
code for the Apollo guidance system, a lot of which she wrote and which
she oversaw.
