India, Oct. 11 -- Hamilton, who died on September 30 aged 90, led the team that wrote Apollo's onboard flight software. She was one of many women whose computing work was recognised late.

One day in the late 1960s, Lauren Hamilton, then four, was playing with the command module simulator at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory. She somehow started P01, a program meant to run only before launch, while the simulated spacecraft was in mid-flight, and the simulator crashed.

Lauren's mother, Margaret, led software work on Nasa's Apollo programme at the lab.

The seemingly harmless incident prompted Hamilton to add a note to the technical documentation, warning users not to start P01 during flight. She also proposed a software fix, but was overru...