By Technology Editor Ken Olsen and Finance Editor Samuel Insull
When a good and heroic person dies, it can make you stop and think.
This week, we learned that pioneering software engineer Margaret Hamilton (not the one who unleashed the flying monkeys), who wrote the software that led Apollo 11 to the moon, died at 90.
The New York Times did write an appropriate obituary:
That's her in 1969, when she was 33, standing next to a printout of the code that she and her team wrote to guide Apollo 11 to and from the Moon, including the bit about separating the Lunar Module from the Command Module, guiding the former to a safe landing and then back to a successful intercept of the Command Module orbiting the moon.
Compared to building an electric car that traps its occupants inside to drown or burn, that's no big deal by today's standards.
Keep in mind though that Ms. Hamilton was writing code for the Apollo onboard computer. It offered 72,000 bytes of storage, as compared to our obsolete Apple XR phone, which has 128,000,000,000 bytes. Let's see, Siri, how much more storage is that? It's about 1,777,778 times as much.
The software was written in binary: 1's and 0's. It had some big problems to solve, like figuring out how to guide the Lunar Module back to the Command Module, in constant orbit around the Moon.
Solving these orbital mechanics questions requires solving equations like this:
Here's Ms. Johnson, not wearing glasses that allowed her to spy on strangers in public:
Notice anything special about her? Hint: in the movie she was played by Taraji P. Henson.
But back to Ms. Hamilton. According to the often-authoritative (when not smearing the Mayor of New York, that is) New York Times:
Ms. Hamilton was a young mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, putting her husband through law school by working in a computer lab. When she learned that M.I.T. was designing in-flight computers for the moon mission, she eagerly joined the team.
She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering on the project, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights....
Ms. Hamilton, who would bring her young daughter to work on weekends and evenings, is credited with popularizing the term “software engineering” to describe the complexity of the work her team did, thus elevating software coding to a status equal to hardware design.
Among her key breakthroughs was her insight that the computer might generate a false alert that left uncorrected could abort the entire mission. To prevent that, she added a subroutine she called FORGET.IT so that Mission Control could override the alert and continue the mission.
Sure enough, some astronaut accidentally flipped the wrong switch just before landing on the Moon, creating an alert. Thanks to her program, the false alarm was overridden and the landing went ahead:
“If the computer hadn’t recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was,” Ms. Hamilton wrote in a 1971 letter....
Boy these arrogant women always blowing their own horn.
To sum up, a brilliant woman went to work to support her family and not only made the moon landing possible, she invented an entire profession.
You'll be pleased to know that she enjoyed continued success in her field and later did important work in the fields of computer science and chaos theory, about which we know nothing.
Her subordinates remembered her as a kind, supportive, effective boss who led a highly productive team. She did not make them sleep in their offices, urinate in bottles, or devote themselves to grandiose futile ideas like, to name one, the Metaverse.
Among the other things she didn't do were:
- She never accumulated a monstrous hoard of untaxed wealth reaching $100, $200, or eve $800 billion.
- She never exploited her subordinates by working them until they dropped or filled their diapers while denying them union representation.
- She never lied about what her software could do, resulting in people dying trapped in their cars during floods or fires.
- She never propagated neo-Nazi propaganda on her captive social media platform.
- She never made billions by sneakily grabbing the personal data of her software's users and monetizing it.
- She never stole an entire world of other people's intellectual property for her own gain.
- She never drooled over underaged girls while flying around with a pedophile sex trafficker.
- She did not spew garbage about how she and her fellow tech geniuses should rule the world or use her billions to advance that cause.
- She never inserted herself into a corrupt Republican Administration and unlawfully shut down an agency mandated by Congress, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of sick and starving families in poor countries:
Horrific cost of DOGE cuts: If current projected US foreign aid cuts remain in place, by 2030 "the projected excess deaths would be 9.4 million (95% UI 6.2–12.6) overall and 2.5 million (1.8–3.2) among children younger than 5 years." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
— Oona Hathaway (@oonahathaway.bsky.social) February 13, 2026 at 2:44 PM
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In short, she thought that being good at tech stuff entitled her to a career and a life and professional respect. She did not believe that her talent entitled her to plunder and rule the universe. In other words, was by today's standards a total loser and not worth taking seriously. (Also she was female and thus only useful for carrying the seed of real Masters of the Universe.)
Her story does make you wonder if the claim of the current generation of computer geniuses that they are somehow entitled to the hundreds of billions of dollars they extract from dullards like the rest of us really stands up. Margaret Hamilton had more brains, courage, and judgment than all these man-boys rolled up into a pile on Epstein Island. And she shared her genius with the world for a paycheck and and a pension.
The distance between Margaret Hamilton and today's rapacious amoral bizarre plutocrats is farther than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. On our current course, the chances of our species surviving except as fodder for and slaves to sadistic entitled plutocrats like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Brin, and Ellison dad and failson are as dark as deep space.
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