An international, cross-disciplinary survey by Nature on page 314 reveals just how powerfully the Apollo programme motivated young people to become scientists 40 years ago - a fact todays space scientists ignore at their peril (see pages 325 and 327).rnYet other events in the summer of 1969 would lead to a far deeper empowerment of scientists - and, indeed, many others. Even as Apollo 11 was putting the first humans on the Moon, Ken Thompson at AT&T's Bell Labs was working to get Space Travel, a computer game he'd written for a mainframe computer, to run on a new, smaller machine. That effort led him to join with Dennis Ritchie and others to write a new computer operating system, which they named Unix. The rest is history: Unix triggered a still-ongoing boom in scientific computing, set the pattern for the open-source software movement and, along with its descendants, laid the foundations for the Internet.
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