Apollo 11 - communications and inventions

At the time of writing, it was T-5mins to the launch of Apollo 11, 40 years ago. The Apollo 11 programme brought us inventions like cordless power tools, freeze-dried food and new water purification techniques. It took some amazing ability to deal with the communications and control challenges considering that the simplest of electronic devices we take for granted today like digital watches and USB memory sticks are more capable than the computers that got people to the moon. The Apollo guidance computer built by Raytheon (one of the big software-defined radio players amongst many other things at the moment) had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at just 0.043MHz . The ‘live’ replay can be followed at wechoosethemoon.com