Why a game?
Margaret Hamilton died on 30 September 2026, aged 90, and MIT announced it on 7 October. Most tributes show the famous photo of her beside a stack of code listings. We wanted people to feel what that code did on 20 July 1969, when an overloaded computer kept a lunar module flying by deciding what mattered most.
What you can do here
- The Executive game: ten missions plus an endless Hamilton Mode, three difficulties, Go/No-Go calls, a live-patch mission, best scores and stars saved in your browser, shareable result links and a downloadable result card.
- The DSKY simulator: real verb and noun combinations, a lamp test, a descent you can overload into your own 1202, and the P01 story.
- The Core Rope Weaver: your name as AGC octal words and woven rope, plus a timed weaving mini-game.
- The Go/No-Go Quiz: 37 questions, 12 at random per round or the full set.
- The tribute: her life, the five alarms and the jokes in the code.
What the game simplifies
The numbers that matter are real: 7 core sets, 5 VAC areas, alarms 1202 and 1201, about 13% of computer time lost to the rendezvous radar, the alarm times on the Apollo 11 track and the restart-and-carry-on behaviour. Everything else is a game abstraction:
- The real computer had an Executive (jobs, scheduled by priority) and a Waitlist (short timed tasks). The game shows only jobs. The grey part of the CPU bar stands in for Waitlist tasks and other background load.
- The job names are inspired by the real software (SERVICER really was the navigation and guidance job), but their priorities, sizes and timings are invented for play.
- On the real computer, nobody chose which jobs to drop by hand. The design made those choices automatically. In the game you help, then live with the restarts.
- The Go/No-Go rule (no more than three alarms in 25 seconds, guidance at 35% or better) is our playable version of Jack Garman's "if it doesn't recur too often".
- The Apollo 14 workaround in the game is a shortened stand-in, not the real keystroke sequence.
- DSKY readouts for Noun 68 and the descent are simulated. Only a small set of verbs and nouns is wired up.
- Missions other than Apollo 11 borrow the descent format to tell their story. They do not reproduce those flights' actual computer loads.
Privacy
No accounts, trackers or analytics. Best scores, quiz results and your theme are kept in your browser's localStorage and never leave your device. Fonts load from Google Fonts.
Sources
- MIT News, "Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90": news.mit.edu
- Wikipedia, Margaret Hamilton (software engineer): en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, Apollo Guidance Computer: en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, Apollo 11: en.wikipedia.org
- NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, "Apollo 11 Program Alarms": nasa.gov
- Discover, "Apollo 11's 1202 alarm explained": discovermagazine.com
- Space.com, on Jack Garman and Steve Bales: space.com
- We Hack the Moon (Draper), on Lauren and P01: wehackthemoon.com
- We Hack the Moon, on Don Eyles and Apollo 14: wehackthemoon.com
- Smithsonian Magazine, on the jokes in the Apollo 11 code: smithsonianmag.com
- Inverse, on the 2016 GitHub upload: inverse.com
- Science News, on core memory weavers: sciencenews.org
- Ken Shirriff, on core rope: righto.com
- Google, "A moonlit tribute to a moon landing icon": blog.google
- The Virtual AGC project's Luminary 099 listings: ibiblio.org/apollo
Credits
Design, code, text and graphics were made for this page. The seven-segment digits, DSKY, rope pattern and social image are drawn in code and SVG. No NASA or MIT images are used. Typefaces: Archivo and IBM Plex Mono, via Google Fonts.
This is an unofficial tribute and is not affiliated with NASA, MIT, Draper or the Hamilton family. If you'd like to honour her, read about her work, teach someone about it, or write software that expects mistakes and recovers from them gracefully.