It was 38 years ago today...........

it is the earliest childhood memory that i can absolutely fix in space
and time (there are some earlier ones, but i am not entirely sure when
or where they took place)

sitting in the living room of my grand parents, with lots of
relatives, watching the b/w tv sitting on top of large cupboard at
some ungodly hourr ..

...................................

the following is stolen from some blog (Chaos Manor) but it fits my
feelings perfectly:

"Once we walked on the Moon. When I was in high school in the 1940's I
read science fiction and knew that I would live to see the first man
on the Moon. I did not know I would live to see the last one.

NASA ate the dream. It is not lack of money. It is NASA, turf wars,
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

We have spent enough since Apollo to be half way to Alpha Centauri. We
cannot even go back to the Moon."

servus

markus

I was working as a control room operator at CKPR TV
in Thunder Bay Ontario while going to college and I
drew the short straw.

I got to stick around after the late nite movie watching
the Indian head test pattern until three AM when I switched
on the national feed and watched Neil take his walk.

In article ,
"TacAN" wrote:

What still fascinates me about those early years - is the electronics, ie
computers that they used.
In the 1960's saw the first discrete transistors and maybe the very early
intergrated circuits.
By todays standards (or even what was becoming available in the 1980's) the
computer power may have been fairly "primitive". Which makes their
achievements all the more spectacular.

Graham

I watched it on TV at a party set up especially for it -- in Huntsville,
AL, where I worked for Boeing, designing translunar flight trajectories.

I remember the JFK assassination, too. I was working for Douglas, in
Culver City, CA and worked with a Texan, whose thoughts were,
"Manchurian Candidate," where LBJ cradled JFK's mortally wounded head in
his lap.

Orval Fairbairn wrote:
In article ,
"TacAN" wrote:

What still fascinates me about those early years - is the electronics, ie
computers that they used.
In the 1960's saw the first discrete transistors and maybe the very early
intergrated circuits.
By todays standards (or even what was becoming available in the 1980's) the
computer power may have been fairly "primitive". Which makes their
achievements all the more spectacular.

Graham

I watched it on TV at a party set up especially for it -- in Huntsville,
AL, where I worked for Boeing, designing translunar flight trajectories.

I remember the JFK assassination, too. I was working for Douglas, in
Culver City, CA and worked with a Texan, whose thoughts were,
"Manchurian Candidate," where LBJ cradled JFK's mortally wounded head in
his lap.


Interesting imagery ... as a comparison to the actual event where Jackie
went over the back of the limo to retrieve part of JFK's skull and
famous hairdo ... apropos the unknown worker/handler who cradled RFK's
head after Sirhan-x2 did his Dallas on him in LA. And where was the
Woman in the Polka Dotted Dress, anyway?

PS:

When the Moon Landing occurred, I was in Okinawa and we watched the TV
image from the Armed Forces TV but the audio came over a local Japanese
station -- there was a delay of some 15 seconds -- the audio feed being
by shortwave and the TV by Satellite. But it WAS something to see. I
never noticed that camera slip which revealed the propped up backdrop of
the movie set at Area 51 that was later edited out of all existent rerun
tapes.

Clever those Kennedy's.

Cheers from the Grassy Knoll

Dave

Bruce R wrote:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...moon_walk.html

Do you remember where you where when Neil walked on the moon??

Sittin in my brother's living room in Cocoa Beach, FL. My brother at the
time worked for a NASA contractor that produced the comm systems on the
Apollo program. Just a few days earlier I was standing beside the VAB
when it launched.
KenG

I was shooting a documentary in Palau...

JT




Bruce R wrote:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...moon_walk.html

Do you remember where you where when Neil walked on the moon??

Bruce R wrote:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...moon_walk.html

Do you remember where you where when Neil walked on the moon??

--

Bruce R

Landing: A controlled mid-air collision with a planet.

i was in and out of the family garage, where the better of the two TV's
was. i was there for the momentous occasion, and then after awhile,
i was in and out, asking if anything was happening. %-)

redc1c4,
we got a color TV just in time for the 72 Olympics... bad timing.
--
"Enlisted men are stupid, but extremely cunning and sly, and bear
considerable watching."

Army Officer's Guide

NAS Whiting Field.

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:52:21 -0400, "Bruce R"
wrote:

Do you remember where you where when Neil walked on the moon??

We had a Zenith 25" B& W television that we got back around 1954 or
55. Parked myself in front of that set for the launch and most of the
significant events, including the walk. Managed to arrange my work
schedule around it all. Recorded the whole thing on the Norelco
cassette recorder I got a month or so before for a graduation gift.
Vividly remember the grainy, hard to make out in the shadows image of
Neil stepping down from that ladder and Walter Cronkite being moved to
tears as he watched it on his monitors.

I still have that tape and all the newspaper and magazine articles.
Later added some JFK recordings to it. Never had a thought of VCR's
and DVD's and all the archival stuff we have now. Back then I felt
that I needed to record as much as I could to pass it on to my kids
and grandkids, for "I was there" when history was made.

A few years later I watched a number of launches all the way up to
Apollo 17 while attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in
Daytona Beach. Unfortunately, all I had back then was a crappy Kodak
Instamatic camera! Oh! Would that I had my current Nikkon N-70 back
then!!!

BTW - that Zenith was still being used by my kids as a video game
center at my parents house until the mid 1980's. One of my brothers
had hooked his Atari to it. Many hours playing Pong on a very dim B&W
screen with my oldest daughter. Sure don't make them like that any
more!

J. W. Alger

"Bruce R" wrote in news:46a13b15$0$16596
:

Do you remember where you where when Neil walked on the moon??

Yeah I was in church In the town of Ewa Beach Hawaii when I first heard the
news and those famous words quoted by our preacher