After Kennedy's speech, it was all about getting to the moon and back. The program was divided into three segments, Mercury was a program of single astronaut space ships and missions to learn how people live in space. The Gemini program was a newer bigger spaceship that could stay in orbit longer and permitted practicing skills that would be needed later for the moon missions. Then, the Apollo program developed the huge space ships and rockets needed to get people to the moon and back.
All of these programs were developed in the 60's. Engineers used slide rules. Calculators did not exist. Computers were huge and took big rooms to hold what is far less powerful that a cell phone. The first one I had access to learn on was at the local college. It took a whole room and had 32K of memory, that is a million times less than the iPhone. It's disk drives were a few megabytes and were the size of a washing machine.
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| IBM 360 computer - the bigcomputer of the 1960's |
The computer in the picture is an IBM 360. They had 1 that we could get time on, at MIT when I got there. The computing power was 1/1,000th as much as an iPhone. And if you care, I could tell you what those lights and buttons do on the front panel. Working with the technology available would seem like the equivalent of the tiny wooden ships the explorers used to find America. The drive to the moon also pushed technology ahead to accomplish the technology required to get people there.
More about this is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_360
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