CliffordK

While Ernesto Colnago had been in the bike business from the mid 50's to the early 60's, the 1968/1969 biennium brought the Colnago Super with the ring of holes bottom bracket.

That may well have been the shift from a small boutique mechanic and builder to a mainstream manufacturer.

Ernesto Colnago apparently made a set of wheels for Eddy Merckx, the "Cannibale" in 1967, and had somewhat of a working relationship with him until the early 70's with the 1972 Mexico City hour record (and the Colnago Mexico in 1975).

Zinger

Yeah here's how that '69 TDF went, lol

Winner: Eddy Merckx
Points: Eddy Merckx
Combination: Eddy Merckx
Combativity: Eddy Merckx

You know i was watching one of the early '70s Tour of Italy and this guy is just pulling everybody around for practically the whole damned tour and just killing off everybody, Climbers are cracking before they ever get to the best of the mountains where they're supposed to shine. Fuentes is angry the next day because he's hogging everything and Mercks just laughs. Jeezus i understand why this guy was god to the fans. Inhuman endurance.

jon c. 

At 11 years old, we were just old enough to wish we could have gone to woodstock. We didn't really get most of music yet, but we knew it was cool. And it was the sheer and unexpected size, and the fact that it didn't result in total disaster, that made is such a renowned event. Probably the largest traffic jam humans had ever seen.

I remember the moon landing as well, of course. But that didn't instill the same 'wish were old enough to go' feeling.

Zinger

Well I got to see Hendrix in Dallas the spring before then. Chicago (Then Chicago Transit Authority) was there and the huge auditorium in Dallas soaked up their sound so that you couldn't hardly hear the brass. Or at least I couldn't but from where I was in my world that afternoon the crowd seemed restless. As soon as Hendrix plugged into that wall of Marshall amps behind him it sounded to me like transformers about to blow in a thunderstorm. I thought: This is gonna be loud. It was. He played all the stuff from "Electric Ladyland" before the album was on the shelves. No problems getting to or from there as Dallas's traffic hadn't become the disaster that it was in the '80s. I don't imagine you could say that about Woodstock. What I've heard was that most of the people had left by the time Hendrix played. Burnout, no doubt, contributing.

I think Yuri Gagarin's orbit made a bigger impression on me than our moonwalk but I was younger, more impressionable, and definitely less distracted than I was as a teen.