Since a certain poster will not be with us on this historic occasion I must say that you guys are all f***ing sheep who will believe anything contrived by the main stream media; anyone with half a brain would understand this was done in a studio somewhere deep inside our government. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming and congratulate all involved particularly those local Grumman workers who built the lunar lander.
Armstrong and Aldrin spent many many hours on Long Island before July 1969 in the only full-scale simulator of the lunar module. There is a plaque on the moon attached to the module that says "Made in Bethpage, New York."
From what I understand Ralph Kramden got on the phone to Aldrin and Armstrong to wish them luck and said "dont fahget..bang..zoom ..right to dah moon!!!!!"
The onboard computers on the command and lunar modules had computing performance that was the equivalent of the earliest home computers of the 1970s, such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET, and was the first computer with integrated circuits. It had 2 kilowords of read-write memory and 24 kilowords of read-only memory (that's 13 KB total in modern usage). The read-only memory was core rope memory, which was created by hand, by literally weaving wires into the grid. Raytheon hired female textile workers in Massachusetts to do this, resulting in this being referred to by programmers as LOL (Little Old Lady) memory. This video is a fascinating discussion of all of this:
There are people who actually believe that shit too. We went to the moon and returned. The offshoot technologies had more to do with our present level of technology than some crashed Roswell UFO. I remember at the time there were a lot of penny pinchers wondering why we were spending so much money on NASA and the lunar landing effort. Once we landed on the moon, you could literally hear the cheers in the streets. Seems like that was an eternity ago considering the present state of affairs.
To give an idea of how many people from various sciences were involved in this project, a colleague of my father was hired by Grumman as a lunar geologist. His job, working with a team, was to figure out what the surface of the moon consisted of so they could design the lander. (No, it was not green cheese!)
My late father in law worked for Rocketdyne after the Korean war. He said almost every rocket they tested either blew up on the launch pad or blew up within a couple of hundred feet of launch. The space program was an amazing leap of faith. We really didn't have any idea we could do it. It was an amazing collaborative achievement that we mostly take for granted. I always think of the moon landing and safe return as the greatest achievement of the US in my lifetime. The Challenger disaster reinforces the greatness of that achievement.
All our brilliant scientist put down their slide rules for computers. So many porn sites so little time.
