The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn’t even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. “Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget.”[source]
Marget Hamilton was the lead programmer and engineer on the Apollo 11 Space Mission.
At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments.
“When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it."[source]
As a working mother in the 1960s, she often had to bring her daughter to work. MIT had very few female engineers.
She popularized the term "software engineering" in order to give legitimacy to her craft.
The complete source code for the mission was recently posted to GitHub.