Astronaut Neil Armstrong was faced with a “go” or “no-go” decision that he had to make in mere seconds. As it did so, the computers started to flash with warning messages. The 20th of July, 1969, marks the date that the ‘Eagle’ was approaching the moon’s surface. These were two 70 pound computers, one was aboard the command module ‘Columbia’, the other was aboard the lunar module ‘Eagle’. This department was dedicated to the writing and testing of software for the Apollo 11 computers. In 1965 she became the head of her own department, the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (aka the Draper Laboratory). Her success at SAGE was evident, and she was the first programmer, and first woman, hired for the Apollo project at MIT. However, the U.S space program had won her over with the fact that she would be working on something that had never been done before, so she applied for the role. In the mid 1960s she saw a newspaper ad that MIT were, in her words, “looking for people to do programming and send man to the moon,” and she thought, “wow, i’ve got to go there.” Her original plan was to study for a degree in abstract maths at the graduate school at Bradeis University in Massachusetts. A year later she was programming systems to locate enemy aircraft in the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) program. Here, she learnt to write software that predicted the weather. In 1959, her husband was studying law at Harvard and to help support her family, now with a young daughter, Lauren, she took a job at MIT. Whilst studying at Earlham College she met her husband, James Hamilton, and they married in the late 1950s once she graduated. She was a lover of maths from an early age and at Earlham College, Indiana, she studied maths with a minor in philosophy. Hamilton was born on the 17th of August 1936, in Indiana, US.
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