45 years ago television program from the Moon Apollo 11
 

http://videokarma.org/attachment.php...1&d=1405557739
Here's a photoshopped picture of an Admiral bakelite TV watching the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Just like back in the day it happened. Even then it was an older TV set, but it still worked.

So what vintage TV do you remember seeing this moonwalk live on? :banana:

A late 50's color Admiral in an ugly black metal box, but damn, was that sucker sensitive!

The moonwalk was on the 20th. The LAUNCH was 45 years ago today...

Was a little kid, and watched it on a B/W Zenith my parents had at the time.

This IIRC, an Admiral color set.

I watched it as a 6 year old. However, with all the rocket stuff that was shown on TV at the time, I didn't understand that it was the very first time for a moonwalk. So the significance of the moment was lost on me at the time.

Watched it on our family's 21" Motorola rectangular screen color TV, which was our first color TV and just a year or so old at the time.

I'm still in awe of what NASA pulled off from a technical point of view. In a period of only 10 years or so, they went from relatively primitive rocket technology to putting a man on the moon, without all of the fancy computer technology that we have today (I realize they had computers, but they were quite limited). Something to be very proud of.

I was nine years old then, and did not have the patience to sit for what seemed like hours not knowing exactly when the moon walking would start. All I remember from the occasional times I walked in to see what was going on, is a split screen showing the moon on one half and maybe some kind of telemetry or other data or graphics on the other. My eldest brother (13 at that time) and my mother watched the whole event. It would have been on the 19-inch B&W Sylvania portable TV that my mother had bought the year before if I remember; it was highly rated by Consumer Reports magazine.

Unfortunately, between my mother's cigarette smoke, having several cats, and the general dust/dirt in the air (plus the abuse of three kids using it), that set's tuner got noisy and intermittent after a while, and we ruined it by doing things like banging on the channel knob or shaft to get the picture back, and when it got worse, we banged on it more, and harder. Years later, we tried tuner-cleaner spray (in the wrong places, I now know), but it was too late. The set itself was still working, other than the tuner issue, with no service calls in five years if I remember right, when we got another TV set in 1973.

Watched it on my then-new 9" B/W Sony.

I remember watching it at 5 years old on our B&W Zenith console

I was 12. Our house didn't have central A/C then, I remember it being DREADFULLY hot that night...

That seems to be about my earliest memory, i was a toddler, but i remember watching at the next door neighbors, with my family and half the neighborhood . I remember standing in front of the set, which was eye level to me..and getting shooed away for blocking the view. I think we were next door because they had a big new color set. my family just had black and white still at that time.

I watched on my Heathkit GR-180 color set. Big service day:
turned it on that morning ... heater cathode short in one
gun of the CRT. That set used a very special fine pitch CRT
that was hard to find. Not a single one for sale in Boston
after an hour on the phone. So I started calling little shops in
Cambridge and the very first one, four blocks from my house, had one.
I and a roommate hand-carried it back, installed and converged it
in plenty of time. (Electrically I would guess that a regular tube would
have worked.)

I and my roommates watched every minute of the moon stuff.
A few months earlier I went across the parking lot to the
Geo dept. when I heard they had moon rocks ... they were letting people
touch one! (Against the rules, but NASA would never know, since they were
going to dissolve it in acid anyway and it was already known to be
full of sodium.)

My grandparents watched the moon landing on a 1966 rca ctc16

I was born in 1977, so I didn't watched the moon landings. I am really envious of the people who were there in 1969 watching such in incredible moment in the History of mankind as it happened. Also one landmark in TV History. Would love to have watched it!

i remember watching it on my dads new color magi console he had just got from buchers apllliance, that was just down the street from where he worked at the olds dealer. but i really remember was the splashdown days later ,my mom maid me sit down and watch for the space capsole ,they would cut in on the tv programing until it got closer to the time the navy picked them up. probley because i was bugging her that day.

Well, first thing, the real time images of the live walk were not nearly that clear. You need to smear up the TV image and add a trailing image lag. It was a few days before the cleaner images were available.

I remember this launch more vividly than the last show I watched on TV!

The launch, in color, and walks, in B&W, were watched on my 16 inch Toshiba, rebranded by Sears, that produced the best NTSC over the air color I ever saw, until I bought my current DLP set in 2005. I watched NBC when they were in color, but switched to CBS when NBC went to B&W.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/21_inch_color.html#sears

Since at the time, I was working at ABC, I also dragged out my "retired" 8 inch Motorola set and left it on top of the Toshiba tuned to ABC.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/motorola_9t1.html

I remember going to work like a zombie the next day after the moon walk from the lack of sleep and guess I was lucky not to get fired.

During the weekend moon landing, I watched, actually mostly listened as it was all off camera, on a 5 inch portable that someone had brought to the set during a break in weekend film shoot.

James

Not moon landing but moon eclipsing the sun in October 1959 as photographed off my parents' Philips projection set at the time. As you can see it had poor flyback blanking and non-existent dc restoration.

Peter

A 23 inch B/W set in the USO club in a little outpost in South Korea. Don't know the brand. Very noisy pic due to distance between TV and the AFRTS transmitter in Seoul, but great anyway. Celebrated with a few JDs and beers later at the Officer/EM Club. :D
Kevin

I'm far too young to have seen it live, but my parents remember. On my mother's side of the family, they recall having a color tv with a smallish screen and watching big events such as the moon landing on it. They apparently used a b&w console tv for everyday viewing, to preserve the color set. I imagine not all programming was in color in the 60s anyway

I believe my parents were still using their trusty old 21-inch B/W RCA set, seen in this photo from the early 1950s (that's me on the left).

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

http://antiqueradio.org/art/RCAOriginalTV.jpg

I was in a Holiday Inn motel room with my whole family, somewhere in Nebraska. I was 9 years old and we were on our way to a summer vacation out west. There was a color set in the room, which was a rare treat for us since we didn't get our first color set until 1975 (a metal case Zenith 25" Chromacolor II). I remember being very disappointed that the moon landing was in black and white...

By July 1969, All new network programming was in color. Although the moon landing was in b&w due to the available NASA technology. I remember, so well, watching the moon landing & walk on our '68 RCA rectangular color set. What a proud moment for the U.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3vVjyqkwrw

-Steve D.

I was in the army and stationed at Blanding, UT. We went over to one of the sergeant's trailers and watched it on a black and white portable. I have no idea what brand or size it was except for maybe 17-19".

Great pic, Phil. Love the TV. :yes:

It was watched by my family on a CTC-7. I don't remember if I saw any of it live or not as I was only 6 weeks old.

Phil
i think i have that rca in the garage.
i wasn't quiet 3 yet but vaguely remember the landing , it was on a 62 zenith 23" bw console.

I watched the apollo missions on my parents 50's box b&w.-cant remember the make but might have a old pix of it in the background.- gotta search through the old photo albums someday...
i was 10 at the time and able to fully comprehend the significance on this event.
i was bicycling around the local swimming pool that had the mission live on thier pa.
i heard the landing live and raced home to wait for the walk.i remember it like it was yesterday!
my earliest memory of nasa was apollo 7-closely followed space exploration since then.
at the time,my mom let me watch every mission on that old b&w. my siblings grumbled at the time but years later-they confessed that if it wasnt for my "dominating" the tv during coverage-they woulda missed out-ha!
still follow space programs to this day!
how many have seen iss "live" over their skys? checkout these links if you wish.

http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/#.U8kUl7yYNok

watch iss video live http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream
cheers
RonL

I can't actually remember what set I saw it on, but I know it has to be a 1966 vintage Motorola 20 inch rectangular hybrid color table model with the walnut-pattern-vinyl covered metal cabinet, because that is what I bought from employee sales in 1966. The picture would gradually get dimmer over a year or so, then you would replace the tubes in the horizontal sweep section & it would brighten up for another year.

I was in my twenties and just finishing a year in Spain. My parents came over for a tour of Europe with me. We were in a little hotel room in Biarritz, France, in the middle of the afternoon, with no TV, but we listened to the landing from VOA shortwave on my Space Master Plata portable radio. I remember that evening looking at the moon and thinking how it had men up there. Still got the radio and it works fine.

WOW! doesnt feel like 45 years ago when i raced home to watch the astronauts walk on the moon live today but happy 45th apollo 11!amazing what they did with the tech available! but then i remember they had the sr71 in 1964!

http://www.space.com/26558-apollo-11...-coverage.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

I remember it seemed like all the air went out of the Space Program after Apollo 11... They followed the Moon landings up with.... Skylab ?!? Really ?!? Apollo 13 was fairly interesting, because of the potential danger involved but the rest of it was kinda all so "Ho-Hum".. By '72, when Apollo was over, nobody much cared about "Space" anymore.

That's not the most amazing thing ... what I find amazing is that
we had worldwide digital audio in 1944!!!

I was at one of the very first public demos of digital audio by Bell Labs
in 1962 ... and never dreamed that it was then older than I was.

Doug McDonald

The astronauts on Apollo 12 having fumbled the TV camera, letting it aim at the Sun, burning it out, didn't help. :sigh: After that, the public being unable to watch live TV from the moonwalk, lost interest in that mission...

Worldwide in 44? You got more info on that?

I watched a news piece on the anniversary of the Apollo mission today on my newly acquired late 60's Setchell Carlson Class room TV/monitor. I'd guess it has not been worked on in a long time yet it still works like new.

Yes, worldwide digital voice communication in 1944 via shortwave radio.

Google SIGSALY

One notes that we have had transoceanic digital text since 1866 and
transoceanic digital text by radio since 1902, just with human ADC and DAC.
SIGSALY was fully electronic (except for the encryption.)

Doug McDonald

The 40s era actress, Hedy Lamarr, who was actually an Austrian Jew, Eva Marie Kiesler, was a whiz in other areas as well. She helped develop some concepts that helped spur on digital technology. She hoped her discoveries would help defeat the hated Nazis, but he discoveries were about 35-40 years too early...

In case you have not seen it, back in 2009 Stan LeBar was the featured guest at the Early Television Museum convention. On the last day of the convention he toured the museum, some of us had cameras and recorded the tour.

https://archive.org/details/Stan_Leb...evision_Museum

Walter
 

I still hear Walter Cronkite in my head. One of the many voices I hear in my head besides the voices emitting from my keyboard.

Oh, another event around this time for my family is that we adopted a kitten, "Cricket" that we then had for 17 years.
http://www.wa2ise.com/cricket.jpg

We lived in Minneapolis, and Golden Valley TV had just serviced our Zenith color roundie combo. I was in the basement watching reruns on an old Admiral black and white, and my dad called us all into the living room just before Armstrong gave his famous remarks. I was 8 at the time, and had seen the launch at school (summer school, half days)

I was 10, and I don't have any clear memories of watching the Apollo 11 coverage, but if we watched anything at home, it would have been on our new GE 21" color TV in 1969. I still have the TV in my living room. It has a green cataract around the outside and the picture is overly green now, but then it was a great TV. We used it until around 1986 when it was replaced by a cable-ready Magnavox.

It had the "automatic warm-up" circuit to keep the tubes lit halfway. I worked on that TV many times and I have lots of spare parts put away for it. It's one of the heaviest table model TVs I've ever seen. Metal cabinet with fake woodgrain and a heavy metal chassis.

We also got a rotating antenna. It worked great, and we could pick up Charlotte and Chapel Hill.