This short article discusses the integrated circuits in the Apollo manned lunar landing program.
The Apollo program played an integral part in helping establish the world market for IC�s.

It was only as recently as September 1958 that the first IC was invented by Jack Kilby ( of Texas Instruments ). This first IC , however ,had external wire connections - a severe drawback for mass production purposes. However, in 1959, Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductors and later founder of Intel ) refined the process by inventing the �monolithic circuit � - putting all components on a chip of silicon and connecting them with copper lines that were printed on an oxide layer. Thus the �microchip� was born.

It took until 1961 before the first practical commercial IC - called a NOR Gate ( comprising three transistors and a load impedance into a TO-5 'can' with 6 connection legs) - was developed and marketed. However, sales were extremely slow in those early months. On 25th May 1961 ,President Kennedy announced that America would put a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960's decade. This program became known as Project Apollo and was totally successful when - on the 20th July 1969 - the Apollo-11 lunar module carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed safely on the Moon. They returned safely to Earth in their Apollo command module a few days later - with their lunar orbiting companion Mike Collins .

To achieve this historic goal many new technologies were required and one of these was a small, lightweight guidance and navigation unit that could process complex trajectory equations and issue guidance commands to the Apollo spacecraft in �real-time� during the flight. This required a computer called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) - to process ,analyse and act quickly upon the rapidly changing data produced during a manned lunar mission. In August 1961 the American space agency, NASA , awarded the very first Project Apollo contract to Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT) to develop the AGC guidance unit for Apollo .