People are starting to remember the summer of 1969, when the Apollo spacecraft landed on the moon. As a result, bits and pieces of the events of that time are surfacing, some the same-old same-old, and some not-so-well-known.

This is one of the not-so-well-known factoids, published by the BBC: the story of the people who worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC, including one techno geek from Harvard and a number of retired watchmakers and textile workers who wove the copper wires that were its software.

"The astronauts toured the production facilities and got people to realise that it was real and they were real," explained Eldon Hall, designer of the AGC.

"The little old ladies said: 'that could be my son so I am going to do my job as well as I can'."

In the most super-technological field of the time, where women scientists were very scarce and no women were allowed to apply to be astronauts (they weren't even allowed to be in the military except as auxiliaries), the great many experiment still would not have been complete without knitters.

However, the entire computer was not so hi-tech. In order to make sure that the software was robust it was "woven" into so-called "rope core memories".

These used copper wires threaded through or around tiny magnetic cores to produce the ones and zeroes of binary code at the heart of the software.

Pass the copper wire through the core and the computer read it as a one. Pass it around and it was read as a zero.

"Once you get it wired it's not going to change without breaking those wires," said Mr Hall.

The rope core memories would become know as "LOL memory" after the "little old ladies" who knitted together the software at a factory just outside Boston.

These ladies would sit in pairs with a memory unit between them, threading metres and metres of slender copper wires through and around the cores.

"It's an extremely time-consuming process and it meant that the programs had to be finished and fully tested months in advance," said Mr Eyles.

It's only now with the perspective of 40 years that Apollo stands out as a unique event, probably never to be repeated in my lifetime
Don Eyles

"But it is extremely robust - that information probably still exists despite being left on the Moon."

This was such an incredible moment in our history. For once in our space race with Russia, we got there first. (That was a very big deal. When you're worried that the other guy is going to dump some missiles in your lap one day, every event that signals "our tech is way better than your tech is something to celebrate.) Also, by that time I was a pure science fiction head. A moon landing was a magical ;-) event to me.

In time, I would have another connection to the Moon landing. A cousin of mine, a major shutterbug, was in the navy, aboard the Hornet, the ship that retrieved the capsule when it splashed down in the Pacific with the astronauts safe inside. My cousin got some GORGEOUS photos of the splashdown, which I treasure still.

In the middle of the Vietnam War and the riots and assassinations at home, that was something good, something we could celebrate. I know the money for the space program could be spent on so many other causes. But I think of all of the things that have been created as a result of the space program, and I look at the dwindling space and resources of our beautiful planet, and--I'm still a 15-year-old geek looking at the earth through the windows of spaceships. I am grateful to the Harvard beatniks, the knitting ladies, the watchmakers, the school teachers, the technogeeks, the IT folks, and the brave people (of both sexes) on the ground crews, in the ships that picked up those splashdown crafts, and in the air who share that dream.