On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans ever to land on the moon.

"My dad got us up in the middle of the night. He actually took pictures of the TV set with that sort of shadowy issue of Neil on the moon, and your mind just races with what this person must be feeling," said Drew Deskur, Kopernik Observatory executive director.

"As a kid, this was an exciting thing. John F. Kennedy said by the end of the decade we were going to have a man on the moon and we had man on the moon in a wonderful illustration of how everyone can come together," said historian Gerald Smith.

As millions watched history 50 years ago, hundreds of workers in the Southern Tier were on high alert. The guidance system and computer programs for the Apollo 11 mission had been written by employees at IBM Endicott.

"People who were working there probably couldn’t talk about it, but they were writing what now would probably seem so simple, then was so complex. The computers were huge," Smith said.

Owego's Link Aviation invented the simulator that trained the pilots, and though technology was a huge factor, the Southern Tier's role in the moon landing wasn't limited to it.

Famous B.C. comic strip creator, and Endicott native Johnny Hart included cartoons inside the astronauts' training manuals.

"Which sounds a bit opposite to what you would think, but they had to break up the monotony of boring training manuals with some humor," Smith said.

A total of 600 million people watched the Apollo 11 mission, so what was used to capture the famous moment? What else but cameras and film from Binghamton's Ansco Company.

"Sorry Kodak, we were better. Ansco was the official film of NASA because they had better quality color film and camera modes," Smith said.

Now 50 years later, educators say that one small step could propel us into much more.

"We then start looking at, how can we build on top of that. What's the next moon shot for us? It may actually be returning to the moon, but returning to the moon is actually a stepping stone toward going toward Mars," Deskur said.

While the future is unclear, one thing for certain is no one will forget where they were on that historic day.