Was 1969 the greatest year of all time?

It certainly was a very good year for sports-stars-to-be, because Michael Schumacher, Steffi Graf and Oliver Kahn were all born in 1969. It was also a great year for actresses-to-be, because Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Cate Blanchett were born in 1969, too. If that wasn't enough, 1969 will forever be remembered for...

• the debut of the Boeing 747 jumbo
• Pelé scoring his 1,000th goal
• the first message being sent across ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet
• Dr Denton Cooley implanting the first artificial heart
• the Woodstock Music Festival

Is there anything I forgot? Well, let's imagine we can travel back in time and it's 17 July, exactly 40 years ago. We turn on the radio, and what do we hear? "Yesterday, Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil Armstrong, "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins, lifted off and is now heading to the moon." Will they land? Will they be able to get back to Earth? Next Friday, 24 July, we'll go back in time again, turn on that radio and hope that the newsreader will say: "The Apollo 11 astronauts have returned safely from the first successful moon landing." Because ARPANET did, eventually, become the internet, you should take a look at the wonderful We Choose the Moon, a website that follows the Apollo 11 mission as it happened. With a very clever touch, the site's designers have put all the communications from the spacecraft and the lunar module on Twitter.

As I said, 1969 will be remembered for, among other things, the music festival that took place from 15 to 18 August on a farm in upstate New York. To give you and idea of what the event was like and what the political mood of the time was like, here's Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock singing "Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die". Some say that 1989 was the greatest year of all, but I'm sticking with 1969. Steffi and Cate would agree with me.