The technology itself is closer to 40 years. The shuttle was being designed during the Apollo missions.
I THINK....it was during one of the EVA's during Apollo 16 or 17, when Congressional approval for the Shuttle was signed off.
It's going to be a complicated mission - huge ammount of robotic arm work ( Station, Shuttle and Japanese Robot arms all get a LOT of workouts)
One thing I like about watching Nasa TV in Quicktime with Flip4Mac (good links here -
http://www.neil-online.com/nasa/ ) is that it archives as you go along, so you can scrub backwards and forwards and see the slow robot arm movements all sped up
http://iphone.akamai.com also has a good feed for touch/phone users.
I'll be out looking for the Station and the Shuttle tonight - should be one good ISS flyover and one for Shuttle. They'll be surprisingly far apart given that they're docking tomorrow. Sadly, docking is a bit early tomorrow for me to see the two of them go overhead together.