midudev / margarethamilton.dev

# margarethamilton.dev
**A scroll-driven tribute to Margaret Hamilton (1936–2026)**, who led the Apollo 11 flight software and gave software engineering its name.
**Visit the site →** · Español · English
## About
> “There was no choice but to be pioneers. No time to be beginners.”
> — Margaret Hamilton
This site tells her story as one continuous scroll, from Paoli, Indiana, in 1936 to the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Every chapter is a full-screen scene animated by the scroll: punch cards, a working DSKY, the tower of printed listings, the 1202 alarm, hand-woven rope memory and the real Apollo 11 source code.
## Scenes
| # | Scene | What happens |
| :-- | :----------------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| 1 | **Opening** | Stars over the Earthrise fly into place and become the letters of her quote. |
| 2 | **Milestones** | Her early years (Earlham, Edward Lorenz, SAGE, Apollo) punched as real Hollerith code on 80-column cards, like the ones used at MIT. |
| 3 | **Lauren** | A working DSKY replays the story of her daughter crashing the simulator with P01, the mistake Jim Lovell repeated on Apollo 8, and the birth of defensive programming. |
| 4 | **The tower** | The famous 1969 photo next to the listings, stacked binder by binder with real Luminary 099 and Comanche 055 module names. |
| 5 | **The 1202 alarm** | The Apollo 11 descent: the program alarms on the DSKY, “We’re Go on that alarm” and “The Eagle has landed.” |
| 6 | **Rope memory** | A wire threads through magnetic cores to spell `1202` in binary: software that was literally woven by hand. |
| 7 | **The code** | Real excerpts from Luminary 099 (`BURN_BABY_BURN`, `PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS`, “PLEASE CRANK THE SILLY THING AROUND”) linked to their exact lines on GitHub, ending with her signature in the README. |
| 8 | **Software engineering** | The two words wobble like the joke they once were, then straighten and gain weight as you scroll, until they name a profession. |
| 9 | **Legacy** | Higher Order Software, Hamilton Technologies, the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. |
| 10 | **Closing** | “Thank you, Margaret.” |
## Screenshots
 Milestones on 80-column punch cards 
 A working DSKY and the P01 incident 
 MIT, 1969: the tower of listings 
 “Program alarm.” 
 Rope memory spelling 1202 
 The real Apollo 11 source code 
 “Software engineering”, once a joke 
 Thank you, Margaret. 
## Under the hood
- **Astro with zero UI frameworks.** The site is fully static: Astro components, scoped CSS and a few small TypeScript modules.
- **Scroll-driven scenes.** Each `[data-scene]` is a tall container with a sticky stage. `src/scripts/scroll.ts` computes its progress (0 → 1) and exposes it as the `--p` custom property, so most animations are plain CSS. Texts appear