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In the mid sixties I was on the USS Godridch, and we were part of the Gemni recovery team.

(Project Gemini was a transitional step between the pioneering Mercury Program and the actual landing a man on the moon)

Many a space capsule we hoisted out of the ocean. Months an months of practice. Lots and lots of pictures. It's intresting to me that never did we pick up a capsule with anyone in it.

All of the real space shots seemed to land in a different ocean. It's odd to me that a few years before we landed on the moon (and got back) we couldn't bring the damm thing down in the right ocean. Remember, that at that time, we didn't have computers like we have today. We used slide rules.

In the seventies I was involved with RCA Astro, and was responsible for maintaining the computers at Cape Kennedy that were used for satilite launches. These machines were multiple HP 2116s that weighed 275lbs each and had 16K of core memmory. Along with all of the instrumentation, they weighed probably 10,000 lbs.

This equipment was needed to get the bird in orbit around the earth.

Could this feat have been aconplished with a sliderule ten years earlier, involving an orbit around the moon? I guess it is possible. A lot of luck had to have been involved. As for myself, I don't believe it.

All the Gemini capsules were picked up by carriers, except Neal Armstrongs flight, which went out of control and came down early.

It doesn't surprize me that NASA ground computers were prehistoric in the 70's. Once NASA rates something, they never change it. Not even to update the OS. It's a reliability thing. They probably kept those computers until the late 80's. The JPL computers I worked with in the 1980's were in the room with the Voyager machines, which were second hand ModComp computers taken from Polaris submarines.

The computers in the LEM and CM were very small (maybe 4k, I don't know), and required much human interaction. The pilots basically had to load each program for each flight phase. The program monitored conditions, and computed angles and burn times. The last of the modern HP calculators were way more powerful. But the Apollo computers were enough. Just barely.

Could this feat have been aconplished with a sliderule ten years earlier, involving an orbit around the moon?

What feat? The only things the computers had to do was orbital mechanics. It's something easily done on a sliderule, the computer on the spacecraft only sped up those calculations.