Her Pioneering Software Code Guided Apollo 11

A pioneering software engineer whose code helped get humans onto the moon for the first time has died at 90. Margaret Hamilton, who led the team that wrote the onboard software for NASA's Apollo missions, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reports the New York Times. Hired in 1965 as the first female programmer on the Apollo project at MIT's Instrumentation Lab, Hamilton rose to direct software engineering for the two guidance computers that flew every Apollo mission—typically with just 72 kilobytes of memory. During Apollo 11's historic descent in 1969, her code told the overloaded lunar module computer—its alarms were flashing—to drop nonessential tasks and keep landing, a design decision that may have made the difference between success and failure.

"Neil's blood pressure was 150," she later said of Neil Armstrong, per the Wall Street Journal. "I felt mine was 200." Hamilton—who is credited with coining, or at least popularizing, the term "software engineering—later founded two tech companies, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2016, and even got her own Lego figure. Along the way, she "became an icon to a generation of women in computer science," per the Journal.