Essay by Eric Worrall
“… Everybody said that was never going to happen …”
Margaret Hamilton, software pioneer who helped put humans on the Moon, dies at 90
OBIT
Her team’s code kept Apollo 11’s landing on course when the guidance computer became overloaded
Lindsay Clark BUSINESS SOFTWARE AND DATABASE REPORTER
Published Thu 08 Oct 2026“Forget It” was the name of a small computer program never thought to be needed, which will nonetheless go down in history along with its author, Margaret Hamilton, the American software engineer who died on September 30, aged 90.
Hamilton led development of the onboard flight software for Apollo’s command and lunar modules, helping astronauts reach the Moon in 1969.
Among her early jobs after joining the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in 1965 was to write the software for the Apollo abort procedure.
“Everybody said that was never going to happen, [so they said] ‘Oh well, good. We’ll give this one to Margaret because she’s a beginner,'” she told the Computer History Museum.
However, an unmanned flight did abort, raising Hamilton’s standing within the team. “It went to [run] this program I had written, which I named Forget It. All of a sudden, I became an overnight expert,” she said.
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For Apollo 11, the software’s restart protection allowed essential landing tasks to continue despite the overload. Computer engineer Jack Garman advised guidance officer Steve Bales that the alarms did not require an abort. “We’re go on that alarm,” Bales confirmed. The crew made it safely to the Moon’s surface and later returned to Earth. The overload was traced to unwanted inputs from the rendezvous radar system.
Read more: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/10/08/margaret-hamilton-software-pioneer-who-helped-put-humans-on-the-moon-dies-at-90/5301988
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In my experience IT teams which include at least one female engineer are far less likely to make mistakes. Female engineers in my experience are more likely to properly address contingencies, and less likely to lose track of important details – a pattern which is obvious to see from Margaret’s contribution to the Apollo mission.
Despite being vastly underrepresented in the industry, women have played a key role in the software ecosystem. Something not many people know, software development was invented by a woman.
If you have ever heard of Lord Byron before, it is probably in the context of the story behind Frankenstein. The author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, stayed in Lord Byron’s Swiss retreat during the time she wrote the story. Frankenstein was written during a washout of a summer, lots of unseasonal storms and wild weather – the infamous 1816 “Year without a Summer” which was triggered by the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption in Indonesia.
But Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace also made a pivotal contribution to history, she helped Charles Babbage develop his Difference Engine, a serious attempt to build a mechanical computer. While Babbage focussed on the engineering side, Lovelace focussed on how to construct the “software” which was to run on the engine – and in doing so, invented the field of software engineering.
Sadly Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage never finished the difference engine during their lifetimes, but working engines based on historical documents were built for the London Science Museum in the 1980s, and a second engine apparently sits in a tech firm lobby in California, according to Wikipedia.
Why despite heroic high achievers like Margaret and Ada, do so few Western women choose an IT career?
I wish I knew.
A few years ago I ran a robot workshop for some local school kids. The school was inviting industry experts to introduce high achieving kids to unusual speciality skills, and I was asked to teach them some robot technology.
It was great fun building hobby robots for the kids, everyone ended the course with a robot they had built and programmed themselves from plywood cut on my laser cutter, + lots of glue and cheap Arduino parts.
But not one girl volunteered for the course.
I asked a high achieving female student I knew socially what she thought of the robot course. Her answer was “It looked really interesting, but I thought it would be too technical for me”.
How are we convincing our girls they don’t have the mental capacity to be engineers?
This isn’t the case in the Far East. When I visited a client office in Taipei, many years ago, about half the software developers were women, including the woman in charge of the technical team I was dealing with. I’ve also worked with very capable Russian female software engineers.
Somehow, in the West, we are deterring our girls from believing in their ability to do technical subjects.
The few women who make it through our Western cultural filter are so outstanding, it gives us a real glimpse of what we are missing out on.
Meanwhile, China and India and Russia and other places which don’t deter their women from tech, gain all the advantages I have repeatedly seen first hand which women can bring to an engineering team – attention to detail, fewer mistakes, and a strong tendency to properly address contingencies.
I hope someone out there is trying to fix the cultural firewall which is deterring our women, because we need more Margarets and Adas. Someday in the future, when an engineer throws the “on” switch for the world’s first super intelligent AI, I really, really want the assurance that at least one woman was involved in ensuring safeguards like “don’t kill all the humans” and “provoking a Russian nuclear attack to wipe out humans who know how to switch you off is unacceptable” were properly implemented.
