"CGI!"
It's always CGI or Photoshop, no evidence given.
This whole burden of proof thing is a mystery to some people.
If only the dumb f*%wits would spend a little time doing some real research then they would learn of the novel solutions that were required.
The world's most powerful nation had diverted a massive amount of money into Apollo, had the brightest engineers and scientists working on it and had the very best technology available at the time. Yet, they couldn't create a simple CGI user-interface.
"The mainframes generally only provided numbers, usually in columns, on the console screens. The work the computers did was to extract the parameters from the telemetry stream, verify they were correct (not garbled that is), and then translate them in the values (units) used by the flight controllers. Sometimes the translation included comparing the value to a norm or limit.
The numbers were then displayed on a CRT screen,
and a full-sized "background" slide which had descriptive text and titles was positioned over the CRT. A TV camera then looked down on this composite image and every console viewing that "display" simply saw that TV camera image on their screen.Consoles could "control" which display and matching background slide were called up by dialing in a specific display number. This caused the display system to tell the mainframe which CRT/slide overlay set to use (i.e., which "channel"), and further caused the proper background slide to move in front of that CRT. The selecting console's monitor was then attached automatically to that channel.
Other consoles could then simply go to that "channel" to watch the same display (or jump back and forth between different displays).
There was no local "hardcopy" capability (no printers). Instead, for this and other reasons, each console was equipped with a "P-tube" similar to that used to day in drive-in banking. This P-tube system extended throughout the control center for moving paper from console to console. When a flight controller hit his "hard copy" button on particular TV channel, the composite image was printed on thermal copy paper at a central location which include a print-out of the requesting console. Technicians stationed at these hard copy machines would take each hard copy and place it in a P-Tube and send it to the requester."
(source:http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000635.html )
"How each channel was generated, though, is almost
shockingly primitive by today's standards. The computers downstairs in the RTCC were responsible for producing the actual data, which could be numbers, a series of plotted points, or a single projected moving point. The System/360 mainframes generated the requested data on a CRT screen using dedicated digital-to-television display generators; positioned over the CRT in turn was a video camera, watching the screen. For the oxygen status display example above, the mainframe would produce a series of numerical columns and print them on the CRT.
The numbers were just that, though. No column headings, no labels, no descriptive text, no formatting, no cell outlines, no nothing—bare, unadorned columns of numbers. In order to make them more understandable, an automated mechanical system would retrieve an actual physical slide containing printed column headings and other formatting reference information from a huge bank of such slides, and place the slide over a light source and project it through a series of lenses into the video camera positioned above the CRT. The mixed image, made up of the CRT's bare columns and the slide containing the formatting, was then transmitted to the controller's console screen as a single video stream.
This process was necessary to dress up and clarify the mainframes' sparse output,
since the modern concept of a single unified graphical display consisting of mixed static and dynamic elements was impossible with the era's technology. The mainframe produced the naked numbers or the moving dot, the slide provided the formatting or the background image, and a video camera transmitted the two separate elements sandwiched together for display on the controllers' console screens"
(source:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/going-boldly-what-it-was-like-to-be-an-apollo-flight-controller/2/ )
