Apollo 11 memories

[MoodyBlues]

If you were alive then and have actual memories of watching the Apollo 11 broadcasts, please share. I already know I'm not the only old geezer around here who watched in awe.

On July 16, 1969, my mom woke us up early, around 6:00am. We gathered around the living room TV and waited, with excited anticipation, for the launch. And then, there it was, a picture-perfect liftoff at 6:32am.

Four days later, we gathered around the TV again, and waited with bated breath for the first ever footsteps on the moon. At 7:56pm it finally happened!

It's hard to believe that was 50 years ago.

 

[Deleted User]

Wish I could recall this, but alas, I was too young.
But what an achievement! Ultimate respect to the folks at NASA, they are awesome!
And what's amazing is, they did all that with the computing power of what is probably equivalent to a smartwatch these days.

 

[Hadron]

I was pretty young, but I do remember watching it (though I suspect it was a time-shifted showing of the landing I watched, since it would have happened at an ungodly hour of the morning here - as a kid that made no difference to me). Though my most vivid memories are of the re-entry, that few minutes window in which there was no radio contact (because the plasma blocked any radio waves) and where a modest error in the angle of entry would be fatal. Those were always a tense few minutes when watching live.

 

[psionandy]

Well......
... I was in the pub a couple of days ago... and there was a talk being given by a physics professor at Liverpool University. He's fascinated by the whole moon landings hoax conspiracy thing, and did a really entertaining talk about why we did go to the moon, and why the so called evidence for a 'hoax' doesn't stand up at all.

 

[dontpanicbobby]

I was 11 years old going on 12 when they landed and what struck me most was that running on the moon was so much different than running on Earth. Those guys were booking with very little effort.

 

[MoodyBlues]

And what's amazing is, they did all that with the computing power of what is probably equivalent to a smartwatch these days.

In another thread, I quoted Brigadier General Charles Duke, Apollo astronaut: "My cell phone has 800,000 times the memory of my Apollo computer."

So that gives us some idea!

 

[MoodyBlues]

I have heard that in terms of memory and raw computing power, a greeting card that plays music is more powerful than the Apollo computers, which *really* puts it in perspective!

Goodness, you're not kidding! That's a really astonishing tidbit.