Moon landing and the first internet nodes

Two unrelated milestones share 1969. On 20 July, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on it. The guidance computer on the spacecraft is a real embedded computer, built from early integrated circuits, flying a vehicle. On 29 October, a computer at UCLA sends the first message over ARPANET to a machine at Stanford Research Institute. The system crashes after two letters.

The Moon landing contributes proof that a computer can steer a machine in real time, and a huge pile of engineering in materials, radio, and life support. It does not by itself create a consumer technology. ARPANET contributes packet switching: a message broken into pieces that can take different routes. That is the internet's idea. The public web comes twenty years later.

Both sit on the chip. The Apollo computer uses integrated circuits at a time when that was a risk. ARPANET uses existing mainframes and a new way of connecting them.

The card pairs them because the year is the same and the lessons are different: one is a computer in a vehicle, the other is computers talking.