I think it's not so much that we weren't ready for a space age tech-wise, but that the the reason we have so much of our technology today is because of investments made in the 1960s. NASA had basically unlimited money to throw at every technical challenge in the way of landing a human on the moon.
The apollo program drove the need for more computational power, more memory, better guidance and navigation and control systems, better materials, experiments to better understand many phenomena, etc. And after the apollo program ended, the contractors that developed those technologies on NASA contracts could just commercialize them. And the data from experiments, on materials, aerodynamics, combustion, and so on, that is publicly available has made engineering so much cheaper and easier.
The apollo program drove the need for more computational power, more memory, better guidance and navigation and control systems, better materials, experiments to better understand many phenomena, etc. And after the apollo program ended, the contractors that developed those technologies on NASA contracts could just commercialize them. And the data from experiments, on materials, aerodynamics, combustion, and so on, that is publicly available has made engineering so much cheaper and easier.