Those of you that were around on July 21st, 1969 will always remember where you were and what you were doing when those last few minutes of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing were occurring.
I remember vividly that I sat perched on the edge of my living room chair watching three television sets that I had moved in to be able to watch all three of the big network channels that were available where we lived.
This was without a doubt man’s greatest achievement in technological advancement in my opinion. I held my breath at the last moment expecting some big green monster to come out and gobble up the Eagle landing vehicle. We all breathed a welcome sigh of relief when Walter Cronkite did, and as he wiped his brow with his handkerchief there was a wild cheer in our house!
The onboard computer overloaded in the last few seconds and Neil Armstrong had to actually fly by stick to land the craft. That computer probably had just a smidgen of the computing power that your little handheld computer of today has.
The fact is they made it. Man on the Moon, incredible ! My Dad made a point of telling me that when he was born they did not have electrical power and he never saw an automobile until he was twelve years old. No one had flown yet and here we were within his life span with men on the moon.
The next day I went around to news stands and purchased all the newspapers that I could locate about the Apollo 11 landing and saved them for future reference. I never would have dreamed that in 30 to 40 years we would be able to read all of those newspaper articles on a thing called a personal computer.
Technology is wonderful. I for one have pretty well kept up with the growth of personal computers and had my first Apple II computer in 1979. It did not even have a disk drive of any kind. You had to load and save programs using a cassette tape recorder.
Now we have the Internet and the whole world has changed forever. If you want to read the first hand news of the Apollo 11 landing just go to Newspaper Archive by clicking on any banner ad or link on this website and see for yourself just how exciting this event was!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Unfortunately I was in-utero at the time of the landing, so I missed it. But I do remember using 8 inch floppies in an Apple II and tape storage on a Commodore PET computer! My own “Apollo moment” was about 28 years after the moon landing, oddly enough, with the Mars Pathfinder mission. Watching on TV as the images came back from that tiny rover on such an alien planet was an amazing moment. For all of its human participation for some reason the Space Shuttle program just never gripped me the same way. I only hope I’m around when humans put their first bootprints on Mars.
Joe, nicely put. The manned space program is so exciting and the moon walks and as you say the mars Lander even were very thrilling. I hope the governemt keeps funding these programs though I understand there is apt to be about a five year lull after 2010 so who knows what will happen. Looks like we will be hitchhiking with the Russians after the shuttles are decommissioned next year. Thanks for the comment.