MTV launched at exactly 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, and the very first thing it broadcast wasn’t a music video at all — it was footage of the actual Apollo 11 moon landing, overlaid with the channel’s own astronaut-planting-a-flag logo, before co-founder John Lack delivered the network’s opening line on air: “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” according to History.com’s account of the launch.

A New Jersey-Only Experiment

MTV didn’t launch as a national phenomenon overnight. The channel’s initial broadcast reached only about 800,000 households, concentrated in parts of New Jersey. Five video jockeys, or VJs, hosted the earliest broadcasts: Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J. Jackson, and Martha Quinn, a lineup AARP’s own retrospective on the channel’s history credits with giving the network its first recognizable on-air personalities.

The Song That Almost Wasn’t First

“Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles became MTV’s first-ever aired music video. According to a account from Ultimate Classic Rock, MTV programmers Steve Casey and Bob Pittman were the ones who actually settled on the song, and the decision came down to a mix of the track’s on-the-nose title and its genuinely strong, telegenic music video.

A Chart Hit in the U.K., a Footnote in the U.S.

Part of what makes the pick interesting is how differently the song had actually performed before MTV chose it. “Video Killed the Radio Star” had topped the charts in the United Kingdom back in 1979, but in the United States it barely dented the Billboard Hot 100, peaking around number 40, according to chart data on Wikipedia’s entry on the song.

How Thin the Video Library Actually Was

A list of the videos aired in MTV’s earliest broadcast window, compiled on Wikipedia, shows the channel rotated through just 116 videos in its opening stretch, playing them a combined 209 times to fill the schedule.

Forty-Five Years From a Moon Landing to a One-Hit Wonder

What’s easy to forget, looking back from a channel’s 45th anniversary, is how improvised the whole launch actually was. The Buggles never had another hit that mattered nearly as much in America. The three minutes of their video that aired at 12:02 a.m. on August 1, 1981, ended up mattering more than almost anything else they ever recorded.