Battlestar Galactica (1978)

Humanity lived on twelve colony worlds in a far distant star system. They fought a thousand-year war with the Cylons, war robots created by a reptilian race which expired long ago. Having never been commanded to cease fire, these war robots continuously waged war against the colonials. Mankind was defeated in a sneak attack on their homeworlds conceived by these robotic servants, now referred to as Cylons, and carried out with the help of Count Baltar (John Colicos). Protected by the last surviving warship, a Battlestar called Galactica, the survivors fled in any ship that could fly. The commander of the Galactica, Commander Adama (Lorne Greene), led this "rag-tag fugitive fleet" in search of a new home on a legendary planet called Earth. The episodes dealt with the fleet's struggle to survive the Cylon threat and to find Earth.

The era in which this exodus took place is never clearly stated in the series itself. The implication of the final aired episode, The Hand of God, was that the original series took place after the Apollo 11 moon landing in July, 1969, perhaps decades or centuries later, allowing for the time necessary for the propagation at light-speed of television images of the landing, which were picked up by the Galactica.

However the later Galactica 1980 series is expressly set in 1980.