The computer that guided Apollo to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of working memory: 2,048 sixteen-bit words of magnetic core.

1969

Its programs sat in a separate read-only memory of 36,864 words.

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The event

• Moon landing1969 · Cape Canaveral. Apollo 11 launched from Cape Canaveral on 16 July 1969, and on 20 July Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon while Michael Collins stayed in orbit. The landing was the climax of the space race.

20th century

More amazing facts

• 1967 · 1974 Humanity's most famous ancestor is named after a Beatles song.
• 1968 Almost every high jumper today goes over the bar backwards, thanks to one American.
• 1968 · 1974 Sticky notes came from a glue that didn't stick well.
• 1969 The first session on ARPANET, the internet's ancestor, crashed after two letters.
• 1969 · 1971 The first microprocessor was ordered for a Japanese calculator.
• 1970 The first spacecraft to make a soft landing on another planet was Soviet.

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