45 years ago television program from the Moon Apollo 11

[wa2ise]

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?

[Celt]

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

[N2IXK]

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.

[JBL GUY]

This IIRC, an Admiral color set.

[Tom Albrecht]

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.

[ChrisW6ATV]

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.

[Sandy G]

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

[mstaton]

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

[Sandy G]

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

[Olorin67]

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.

[dtvmcdonald]

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.)

[radiotron]

My grandparents watched the moon landing on a 1966 rca ctc16

[Captain Video]

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!

[snelson903]

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.

[earlyfilm]

Originally Posted by wa2ise

Here's a photoshopped picture of an Admiral bakelite TV watching the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Just like back in the day it happened. . . .

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