...now see what you did? I entered "space mood", and I ended up reading all kinds of irrelevant information on wikipedia.
The first "close up" from mars was taken with Mariner 4 in 1964 which did a flyby and send about 634kb worth of data back painfully slow.
Btw, those zanny digital cameras that save pictures in .jpgs and such? Are you nuttorz?
The microchips in a modern digital camera could probably run the entire space center back then.
Mariner 4, used a "TV camera", for lack of a better word, that was basically a lens focusing light into cathodic ray tubes and converting it into electrical signals. Those then were written into a magnetic tape, like a casette player. (and I suppose some people will soon need a picture in order to know what that is). Said tape could store about 20 pictures that way.
That magnetic tape then was "played back" (the same way audio casettes did), except that instead of music, it played the picture data (probably sounds like noise), and transmitted through the radio.
In fact, the entire computer of the spacecraft was based on such tapes. Forget about hard discs and such. Think of something like a lot of tape recorders with "commands" in them, and a guy on earth sending with very analog and honest Radio Control the command to "click the play button" in one of them. But instead of outputing the electric signal to a speaker, they were connected to other electric systems doing stuff.
