Echoes from the Summer of Love

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

It was all California, simultaneously hot and cool. It was big because it was small. It was the highest of high-tech and the lowest of low-profile.

And the tech set looked at it and slavered.

It was not 2007, and it was not the iPhone.

It was 1967, and it was the Cal Tech.

It was the world’s first handheld calculator. And it gave birth to the nerd, the geek — the love child of the Summer of Love.

Gentlemen, start your fingers
When Texas Instruments debuted the Cal Tech on March 29, 1967, it immediately democratized technology. Computers were no longer the monopoly of the buzz-cut white guys in skinny black ties and shortsleeve dress shirts walking around NASA. And some day, you, too, would have your own blipping, flipping communicator, thanks to the integrated circuit, the bedrock component of the modern computer, cell phone and TV.

The Cal Tech proved that personal, mobile technology wasn’t just a fantasy dreamed up by the prop masters on “Star Trek.” Today, about two centuries ahead of the “Star Trek” schedule, the cell phone already “exceeds the imagination of ‘Star Trek,’ ” said Capt. Kirk himself — William Shatner — marveling aloud at a technology conference in Canada this year.

Heck, Kirk’s communicator didn’t even have video.

Tragedy on the launch pad
That technological race to the future, though, looked in considerable doubt just two months earlier, when the Apollo space program suffered a tragic birth.

NBC archive video Fallen explorers Watch NASA's video tribute to the astronauts of the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia tragedies. NASA

The AS/204 rocket due to have taken Col. Virgil Grissom, Col. Edward White and Lt. Cmdr. Roger Chaffee on a two-week mission orbiting the Earth — as the first step toward the “one giant leap for mankind” — was destroyed by fire during a training simulation on Jan. 27, 1967.

All three astronauts were killed in the accident, and AS/204 was renamed Apollo 1 in their honor. (Two more planned launches later in the year were scrubbed, and that’s why the launch series skips from Apollo 1 to Apollo 4.)

The Apollo 1 capsule has never been displayed to the public. According to NASA, it remains in an environmentally controlled warehouse at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Summer of Love or Summer of ’07?
Does this look familiar? The Republicans are looking for a way to seize the presidential nomination against the backdrop of an intensely unpopular war. They have the old hawk who lost seven years ago, but he has to deal with a newcomer named Romney and the prospect that disenchanted conservatives will have a folksy actor to rally behind.

The wars? Vietnam and Iraq, of course. The old hawks? Former Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John McCain. The newcomers named Romney? George and son Mitt. The folksy actors? Ronald Reagan and Fred Thompson.

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