Tag: video

Apollo 11

Those guys didn’t move around very much at all

2009-07-14: Remembering Apollo 11

40 years ago, 3 human beings – with the help of many 1000s of others – left our planet on a successful journey to our Moon, setting foot on another world for the first time. Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. aboard. The entire trip lasted only 8 days, the time spent on the surface was less than 1 day, the entire time spent walking on the moon, a mere 2.5 hours – but they were surely historic hours. Scientific experiments were deployed (at least 1 still in use today), samples were collected, and photographs were taken to document the entire journey. Collected here are 40 images from that journey 40 years ago, when, in the words of astronaut Buzz Aldrin: “In this 1 moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind”.


2009-07-24: Apollo 11 Goodwill Messages

May the high courage and the technical genius which made this achievement possible be so used in the future that mankind will live in a universe in which peace, self expression, and the chance of a dangerous adventure are available to all.

2019-06-14: The Biggest Nonmilitary Effort in History

The Apollo computers had a total of 73kb of memory. If you get an email with the morning headlines from your local newspaper, it takes up more space than 73kb. … They hired seamstresses. … Every wire had to be right. Because if you got it wrong, the computer program didn’t work. Even on John Glenn’s famous orbital flight — the first US orbital flight — the computers in mission control stopped working for 3 minutes out of 4 hours. Well, that’s only 3 minutes out of 4 hours, but that was the most important computer in the world during that 4 hours and they couldn’t keep it going during the entire orbital mission of John Glenn.

2019-07-19: Margaret Hamilton tribute

With the anniversary of that moon landing approaching, Google set out to shine a light on Margaret’s influence on Apollo, and on the field of software engineering itself. The tribute was created by positioning over 107K mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mirrors normally do. The result is a 3.6-km2 portrait of Margaret, bigger than New York’s Central Park.

Flashback to the VHS Web

Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.

so awesome.