While originally brought in to Draper as a programmer, Hamilton quickly moved up in the lab until she was eventually put in charge of all of the software development for the Apollo command module's guidance computer, and later on, for the Apollo lunar lander guidance computer as well.
That additional code meant more for the programmers at Draper to have to debug, so there was initially some resistance to this during the early Apollo missions, but eventually, Hamilton got her way.Hamilton's doggedness for tracking down errors in the Apollo Guidance Computer's code also inspired a much more rigorous approach to programming than existed at the time.
"So one of the things that we were really worried about is what if the astronaut made a mistake — We were also told that the astronauts would never make any mistakes, because they were trained never to make mistakes," Hamilton recalled. What had actually happened was that the checklist that the Apollo 11 astronauts were using during the descent told them to toggle a switch for the
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