E

InterPack trade fair. The first servo-driven packaging machines appear, initially with stepper motors, and in the following years with brushless motors.

Earthquake in Los Angeles, >7 on the Richter scale

Russian Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin solemnly hands over to the families of the victims of flight RC135 KE007 the black box of the plane that was shot down by mistake by a Soviet fighter on September 2, 1983, off the coast of Japan with 300

At a dinner, Fidel Castro reveals to his former rival Robert MacNamara that there were 162 missiles in Cuba during the missile crisis, which he knew were nuclear, that he himself had asked Khrushchev to use them and that he knew the consequences would be

For the first time, a microprocessor has achieved the computing power of the entire human race combined. It’s the Intel 486 DX, which reaches 60 MIPS. The world’s population is 5.5 billion, with a combined computing power of about 60 MIPS. In 1994, Intel’s new

Bob Peurifoy resigns from Sandia. His lifelong fight for greater nuclear weapons safety in peacetime has now been successful. What years ago was seen as an unnecessary potential reduction in the weapon’s wartime effectiveness is now considered a necessary feature of every nuclear weapon.

After only 29 hours of ground fighting, the Republican Guard, the best part of Saddam Hussein’s army, retreated and thus emerged largely unscathed from the war.

Cambodia. Vietnamese leave the country after 11 years of occupation.

Magellan enters orbit around Venus and maps the entire surface with a 100m-resolution synthetic aperture radar

Mandela released. Nelson Mandela, leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, is released after 27 years of imprisonment. A member of the African National Congress (ANC), he had promoted nonviolent resistance to apartheid, but following the massacre in the black township of Sharpeville (1960),

Nelson Mandela is freed by South African President De Klerk and opposition parties are legalised

The Soviet Union lifted restrictions on Jews emigrating abroad. Massive emigration to Israel began, increasing the small nation’s population by a staggering 12% in just four years.

An investigative commission condemns the Tuskgee experiment, conducted at the Macon County Health Center in Alabama, beginning in 1932. It analyzed the progression of untreated syphilis in 600 Black farmers, 399 of whom were infected. The subjects were injected with a serum that was actually

First prototypes of Scram Jet (Supersonic Combustion Ramjet) engines with no moving parts

During a popular demonstration, on the night between November 9th and 10th, the Berlin Wall was torn down.

Opening of the Berlin Wall. East Germany opens its border with West Germany. In the late 1980s, East Germany’s communist Prime Minister Erich Honecker had resisted Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal reforms, which he considered subversive. In the summer of 1989, Honecker’s conservative regime was

Hungary. The Hungarian communists follow the Polish example and call new elections.

Jiang Zemin, Secretary of the Communist Party of China

Poland. Solidarity wins the elections. The communists are no longer in power in Warsaw. Incredible.

Hurricane Hugo rages on the US East Coast: damages amount to 1% of US GDP

Artificial intelligence (AI): Hornik et al.’s Universal Approximation Theorem shows that any function can be approximated by a sufficiently deep and broad neural network.

Gerard J. Milburn shows that a Friedkin gate can be implemented using photons and beam-splitters.

New York Accords and withdrawal of 50,000 Cubans from Angola (in 20 years they suffered 10,000 deaths)

Exxon Valdez sinks on Alaskan shores

Truce in the Iran-Iraq war at the explicit request of the UN; deaths: >2 million; cost: US$150 billion; in the conflict, several interests were intertwined: the anti-Iranian ones of the Americans and the anti-fundamentalist ones of the Soviets, both on the side of the Iraqis;

Milan. The mosque-study center on Viale Jenner, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, has been active in jihadist activities since its founding in 1988, even before Bin Laden was wanted. In August 2003, Fahdal Nassim, who had departed from Viale Jenner, blew himself up in

Shenzhen (near Hong Kong), China. Ren Zhengfei decided to found Huawei with a capital of 21,000 yuan in 1987. He became Huawei’s CEO in 1988 and has held the title ever since.

Japan. Kamiokande, an underground proton decay detector converted to neutrino detection, detects solar neutrinos.

With the Digital Orrery, the substantial (i.e. probable) stability of the solar system is demonstrated: stable deterministic chaos or: unpredictability of position and velocity but probable (not certain) stability.

First cases of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform cephalopathy BSE) in England

The US-USSR summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. The meeting is a moment of extraordinary possibility and optimism. From the documents: “The President agreed this could be sorted out… cruise missiles, battlefield weapons, sub-launched and the like. It would be fine with him if we eliminated all

Soviet Mi-8 helicopters began shuttling over Chernobyl’s reactor 4 to cover it with sand and limit the damage. Over the following months, 340,000 people participated by air and land in securing the area. The number of people killed by radiation was never clarified by the

The European Community is enriched by Greece, Spain, and Portugal

At a conference in Cold Spring Harbor, Renato Dulbecco launched the idea of mapping the entire human genome; initially dismissed as derision or a science fiction venture, it was soon taken seriously. Dulbecco, a Nobel Prize winner, was Italian by birth, a Catholic partisan, and

Philippines: General Marcos is deposed

The first module of the Soviet Mir space station is launched into orbit. When completed, it will weigh 135 tons and have a pressurized volume of 70 cubic meters.

Boeing replaces the INS system with the integrated GPS-INS system on its cruise missiles (ALCM)

The Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia erupts, killing 23,000. The eruption of Nevado del Ruiz occurred after sixty-nine years of dormancy. It caught nearby towns unprepared, even though the Colombian government had received warnings to evacuate the area from multiple volcanology organizations when volcanic

The Egyptian plane carrying surrendering Palestinian pirates is hijacked by US jets to the NATO base in Sigonella; the Italian government (Craxi and Andreotti) lets Abu Abbas go. A few days later, Spadolini will overthrow the government for this reason.

Hijacking of the Achille Lauro by Abu Abbas’ Palestinian group

In 1985, Morris Chang was recruited by the Taiwanese government to help develop the emerging semiconductor industry. In 1986, Morris joined the nonprofit research institute ITRI, based in Hsinchu, as chairman and president, and launched what would be TSMC’s first semiconductor wafer fabrication facility on

On its journey to Halley’s Comet, Vega 2 launches a balloon into Venus’ atmosphere that transmits for 46 hours and a probe that transmits from the surface for 57 minutes.

On its journey to Halley’s Comet, Vega 1 launches a balloon into Venus’s atmosphere that transmits for 46 hours and a probe that transmits from the surface for 56 minutes. Vega 2 follows four days later, while the lander successfully lands north of Aphrodite Terra.

Francesco Cossiga President of the Italian Republic

Professor Harry Kroto and his team discovered, in a candle flame, carbon atoms self-arranged into a 60-atom supermolecule shaped like a soccer ball: these are buckyballs, or fullerenes. Professor Harry Kroto and his team won the Nobel Prize for this in 1996.

The 21-volume Academic American Encyclopedia is available in print for $650, and the newly released CD-ROM set is just $89.95.

Michel Foucault dies. He was one of the most prestigious left-wing intellectuals in France and internationally. He extolled Khomeini’s regime in Iran as a valid alternative to declining Western capitalism.

The Space Shuttle Challenger (mission STS-41C) rendezvouses, approaches, and repairs the SMM (Solar Maximum Mission, or SolarMax) satellite in orbit. This is the first in-orbit repair of a satellite in history. The episode will be featured in the IMAX documentary “The Dream Is Alive,” which

American Howard Schultz opens a tiny coffee shop in Seattle, offering espresso, macchiato, etc., in a friendly atmosphere (something Schultz had grown fond of while staying in Milan in 1983); within 20 years he will have 10,000 locations worldwide under the name Starbucks (named after

Hanna deposited the Codex Tchacos, containing the Gospel of Judas, in a safety deposit box at the Citibank branch in Hicksville, New York; it remained there, deteriorating, until, incredibly, April 3, 2000.

Off-line programming systems on display at the ROBOT 8 fair, with the possibility of off-line simulation of the machining process with processing and graphics tools and subsequent download of the program for actual machining

Yuri Andropov dies, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko

China. Xi Chang launch range. First launch of the liquid hydrogen Long March 3 (CZ). China thus becomes the second country with liquid hydrogen technology for carrier rockets.

Los Angeles Olympics

The Soviet monitoring system detects five Minuteman missiles incoming over the USSR. Red Army officer Stanislav Petrov must decide within minutes whether this is a genuine American nuclear attack. He alerts his superiors. No action is taken. It later turns out that the five missiles

Sao Paulo, Brazil. Forty police officers surround the home of Tommaso Buscetta and arrest him while he is with Leonardo Badalamenti, son of the mafia boss Gaetano. A bribery attempt by Buscetta himself is futile, and he is sent to prison for several drug-related murders.

The fourth generation of CPUs is born: Intel 80286 (110,000 transistors), Motorola 68020, both with cache memory and the ability to perform multitasking with protection of memory areas

Konrad Kujau, alias Konrad Fischer, alias Peter Fischer, alias Heinz Fischer, alias Doctor Fischer, alias Doctor Kujau, alias Der Professor, alias Der General, alias Conny, the forger of Hitler’s diaries, who had already turned himself in to the police as an intermediary for the diaries,

Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, after purchasing the rights to publish Hitler’s diaries in the UK from Stern, proposes inviting Hugh Trevor-Roper to write an article debunking the rumors that the diaries are fake. What follows will go down in international journalism history:

End of the Cold War

All ARPANET hosts simultaneously switch from NCP (Network Control Protocol) to TCP-IP

Lockheed Advanced Development Projects, (the famous “Skunk Works” team in Burbank, California) makes the first F117-A operational

American biochemist Kary Mullis of Cetus Corporation invented PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction), a technique that would become widely used to rapidly make billions of copies of a specific, small DNA sample. This allowed only small samples to be taken and then amplified, allowing DNA to

Beirut, Lebanon. Bechir Gemayel, founder of the right-wing Christian Phalange, was assassinated by the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, along with 26 other victims, virtually all Christian Phalange politicians. Gemayel had just been elected President of Lebanon on August 23, 1982. He had yet to take

Physicist Hugh Everett, creator of the Many Worlds Interpretation, dies in his bed at just 51 years old.

A 3m-long scale model of a Soviet orbiter, designated BOR-4, flew four times from June 4, 1982, to December 19, 1984.

Moskito Island, Caribbean. Edward Fredkin organizes an informal symposium on Cellular Automata Machines (CAM), with the contribution of the young mathematician Stephen Wolfram (a PhD from CalTech at just 20 years old), who will found Wolfram Research, which in 1987 will produce Mathematica, a powerful

Richard Stallman developed a UNIX-like operating system (developed at BellLabs in 1971 and used at many universities and research centers). With typical hacker humor, he called it GNU (Gnu is Not Unix). He distributed it “free, like air.” Stallman, however, struggled to complete a successful

John Kinckley Jr. shoots US President Ronald Reagan, who nearly bleeds to death.

The AIDS virus is discovered: it will kill 500,000 people in the USA alone in 20 years.

“Hot” superconductivity discovered

Mujahideen intensify fighting in Afghanistan supported by US, Pakistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia

CNN begins broadcasting 24-hour news programs

Fidel Castro authorized 125,000 Cubans, most of them without basic education, to leave the country by boat to Florida, which thus increased its workforce by 7% in just a few months.

Physicist Tullio Regge, in Scientific American, first discussed creso wheat, patented five years earlier by Bozzini and Mosconi, which was produced in “gamma fields” using radioactive cesium. It would soon become (in 1982) the most widely cultivated wheat in Italy.

Violent clashes between Tupac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso in Peru leave 1,984 civilians dead and 1,542 rebels dead.

Fourth American economic and social cycle. Ronald Reagan, symbol of this era, breaks the previous patterns. High taxes made new large investments impossible. Reagan breaks the vicious cycle by lowering taxes and increasing the amount of money in circulation. Corporations modernize the economy through heavy

Mecca. Saudi Arabia. Fifty thousand people are gathered in prayer around the holy Kaab, when a person pushes the imam aside and takes the microphone to make an announcement. Others open offering containers and pull out numerous firearms. It is the beginning of an attempt

Tehran, Iran. American hostage crisis. The escaped American diplomats spend the night sheltering in the Swedish embassy, but are then evacuated when it is learned that the revolutionaries know about the American diplomats and are hunting them.

Smallpox has been completely eradicated worldwide. In 1850, it was present in 148 countries.