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Steven Spielberg is the director of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

John Carpenter is the director of Escape from New York (Iena Prinsklin)

Jack Corliss (Univ. of Maryland) hypothesizes that life began underground at temperatures even above 100C, and then came to the surface.

Harry and Derek solve the mystery of the Anomalocaris from the Burgess Shale: what was thought to be an animal is actually a small appendage of a much larger animal (about 60cm-1m long). The Peytoia is not a jellyfish but the mouth of this large

Voyager 2 on Saturn

In an unlikely location for the event, the ballroom of a Waldorf Astoria hotel with its ornate wallpaper and heavy curtains, IBM announces the commercial launch of its Personal Computer (with an Intel processor), priced at $1,565 including the computer, monitor, keyboard, printer, and two

Fujio Masuoka invented solid-state memory at Toshiba (the DRAM giant) that could retain information even after the power was turned off. Toshiba ignored the invention, which was instead adopted by Intel, which called it flash memory, or NAND.

Gilles Villeneuve wins an incredible Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama: the top five drivers finish within a single second; Villeneuve in the Ferrari, Laffitte in the Ligier, Watson in the McLaren, Reutmann in the Williams, and De Angelis in the Lotus. Villeneuve manages to fully

Yuri Andropov stuns KGB conference by notifying Reagan administration is preparing for massive nuclear attack on USSR

The Space Telescope Science Institute is established in Baltimore, Maryland.

Gerd Heidemann of Stern presented Hitler’s first diaries to the management of Gruner & Jahr; this sparked a sort of group psychosis in which everyone wanted to believe the diaries’ story regardless of the objective and scientific truth (i.e., the diaries were a clear forgery,

Military coup in Bolivia, Claus Barbie, former Nazi leader, suspected of having taken part

John Lennon is murdered by a deranged man in New York City

Earthquake in Irpinia: 8.0 on the Richter scale, 2,614 deaths

Iran-Iraq conflict begins: Iraq invades part of northern Iran

Tetra Pak inaugurates a plant in Modena for the assembly and final testing of its machines

Damascus, Arkansas. Early morning. The W-53 thermonuclear warhead leaves Damascus inside a container. It has been secured by Air Force personnel for the past three days, working under a tent, to hide it from CNN staff, who are making one of their first 24-hour reports

British General John Hackett writes the political fiction book The Third World War. Suddenly, it becomes clear to the general public what has been clear to the military for decades: a possible conventional attack by the Red Army on Western Europe cannot be contained conventionally.

Damascus, Arkansas. 3:00 a.m. The Titan II’s lower fuel tank collapses, fuel and oxidizer come into contact, and the missile explodes. The 9,000,000-ton W-53 warhead is projected upward and is found several hours later, 100 meters away. The intrinsic safety device does its job, and

6:40 PM. Damascus, Arkansas. 6:40 PM. Senior Airman David F. Powell and Airman Jeffrey L. Plumb enter Launch Complex 374-7. They’re scheduled to perform routine maintenance on a Titan II missile. Standing 110 feet tall and with an aluminum body, it’s an impressive sight inside

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein declares the border with Iran invalid. Skirmishes between their respective armies are already underway in Khuzestan.

Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. 8:30 PM. A B-52 is taking off with its nuclear weapons load during a routine training exercise. After a few seconds, the pilot shouts into his headset: “Terminate! Terminate! Terminate!” The navigator, under these circumstances, should open the

Sunday evening. Bill Gates gathers his team and decides to go with the go-ahead for IBM’s operating system project. They’ve purchased Paterson’s QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and now they have to adapt it for IBM. Then, with Ballmer, they fly to negotiate with

A robotic system, developed by the University of Rhode Island, equipped with vision capable of picking up components randomly placed in a container

Bologna massacre: A bomb (later attributed to the far-right) explodes in the waiting room of the Bologna train station, killing 85 people and injuring more than 200. Over the next four decades, right-wing extremists Francesca Mambro, Giuseppe Valerio “Giusva” Fioravanti (life sentences), Luigi Ciavardini (30

Israel. The Basic Law is passed, declaring Jerusalem, whole and united, the capital of the State of Israel.

Western countries deserted Moscow Olympics in protest against invasion of Afghanistan

Canale5 begins broadcasting

China. Deng Xiaoping’s triumph is now complete. China has changed again.

Trial of the Gang of Four in China and execution of Mao’s wife

Exodus of 125,000 rafters from Cuba to Florida

Irvin Kersher is the director of “The Empire Strikes Back” (episode 5 of the Star Wars saga); a Lucas Films production.

Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre dies.

The homicide rate in the United States peaks locally at 10 per 100,000 people per year (0.010%/year), then drops by half from 2010 onward. England had a rate of 1 per 100,000 people per year (0.001%/year) in 1980, rising to 1.5 in 2004, before declining

Forty-four percent of the world’s population over 15 years of age is illiterate. This figure will drop to less than 15% by 2014.

US nuclear missiles are installed in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom

Following the Iran hostage crisis, US President Carter orders a halt to American oil imports from Iran.

Tehran, Iran. American hostage crisis. Canadian Prime Minister Joseph Clark gives the green light to do everything possible to help the escaped American diplomats, now guests of the Canadian Embassy.

Islamic fundamentalist revolution in Iran and American hostages at the embassy

The Vela Incident (aka South Atlantic Flash). This is an unidentified double flash, clearly recorded by the American Vela Hotel spy satellite. These are satellites in orbit designed to record nuclear explosions. This double flash, between South Africa and Antarctica, in the middle of the

The American probe Pioneer 11 passes just 21,000 km from the tops of Saturn’s clouds.

Sandinistas (Pastora and Ortega) triumph in Nicaragua, ending the Somoza family dictatorship.

Idi Amin’s overthrow. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin fled the capital Kampala in the face of advancing Tanzanian troops and the Uganda National Liberation Front. Two days later, Kampala fell, and power was handed over to a coalition government composed of former exiles. Amin, head of

Stanton J. Peale, studying the resonant orbits (with a 1:2 ratio) of Europa and Io, satellites of Jupiter, predicts impressive tidal effects capable of triggering grandiose volcanic phenomena

Pioneer 11 flies past Saturn and then heads towards the constellation of Sagittarius, whose first stars will be reached only in 4 million years.

A complete Space Shuttle with orbiter, ET, SRBs is assembled in Huntsville, Alabama and tested under vibrational stress and with different weights simulating the various phases with water instead of propellant.

China invades Vietnam with at least 200,000 troops, perhaps twice that number. In response to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, China occupies Vietnam. Tensions between Vietnam and China had escalated in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War. As part of its expansionist attempt

Tehran, Iran. A group of left-wing students occupy the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; Khomeini calls in the police and forces the students to leave the premises.

The third generation of CPUs is born: Intel 8086 (30,000 transistors) and 8088 at 5MHz with pipelines to fetch the current instruction while executing the previous instruction

The father of Larry Page, future co-creator of Google, buys his son the Exidy Sorcerer, a home computer for hobbyists, created by Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop chain, who first hired Steve Jobs for the Apple I.

Construction begins on the Space Telescope’s 2.4m main mirror

team led by Dutchman Herman te Riele and Australian Richard Brent proved that the first 200 million zeros of the Riemann zeta function fall on the line passing through 1/2. However, there was a bet pending between Zagier and Bombieri (two bottles of excellent Bordeaux)

Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe suggest that microorganisms, especially viruses, are continually arriving on Earth via debris scattered by comets (continuous panspermia).

Briggs completes his monograph on Anomalocaris from the Burgess Shale but fails to recognize that what was believed to be an animal was actually a small appendage of a much larger animal (about 60cm-1m).

Idaho, USA. Micron Technology, Inc. is founded. It is an American manufacturer of computer memory and data storage, including dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), flash memory, and USB flash drives. It is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Micron and Intel jointly created IM Flash Technologies, which produced

Nobel Prize in Physics to Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation

First report of HIV (AIDS) in the USA

China. Deng Xiaoping’s economic plan works: in just six years, farmers’ incomes double.

More than 2.1 billion people, 40% of the world’s population in 1991, saw their countries transition to free-market capitalism. These included China, India, and the Soviet Union. This was the fastest and most massive economic regime transition ever seen: faster, for example, than the adoption

China. Two years after the death of Mao Zedong, leader Deng Xiaoping persuaded his colleagues to adopt a radically different approach to government and administration from the Marxist approach of his predecessor. Private property was permitted, central planning was partially abandoned, and international trade and

Brain Science: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) is proposed, based on three principles: during early fetal brain development (Developmental Selection), patterns of neuronal connections are formed through epigenetic variations (i.e., not just hardware variations but those that depend on which neurons are activated);

13 deaths in Italy due to terrorism

Fighting between Cambodia and Vietnam.

Panama regains control of the canal. On September 7, 1977, the United States signed a treaty with Panama, agreeing to transfer control of the canal to the country starting in 2000. In 1903, the US desire to build a canal in the Isthmus of Panama,

“Star Wars” (episode 4 of the Star Wars saga) directed by George Lucas is released in American theaters; 20th Century Fox is the only company to agree to make a film of this kind and guarantees Lucas, a director who until then had been independent,

Zilog releases the Z80 microprocessor

The two Americans Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer obtain somatostatin through genetic engineering

chance conversation between father and son, Luis and Walter Alvarez, a physicist and a geologist, leads to the discovery of the KT event or the 65-million-year-old Chixulub meteorite impact; Walter Alvarez had in fact discovered a layer of Iridium (of probable extraterrestrial origin) in Umbria

Steven Weinberg publishes “The First Three Minutes”

Jean Bedel Bokassa, dictator of the Central African Republic, changed the nation’s name to the Central African Empire. A year later, he was crowned Emperor in a lavish ceremony costing $20 million, a third of the national GDP. He was overthrown and exiled in 1979

At Mao’s death, China-US trade amounted to just $336 million, equal to Honduras-US trade and one-tenth that of Taiwan-US trade. Trade with the United States exploded during the Deng era and continued to grow into the 21st century.

The Apple I is the first personal computer: it is produced in a garage in Cupertino, California by Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak

In the context of supergravity theory, the hypothesis of the existence of a spin 2 particle is advanced: the graviton, the vehicle of the gravitational force.

Stony Brook State University, Long Island. Daniel Freedman, Sergio Ferrara, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen write the Theory of Supergravity. It also includes the graviton and its partner, the gravitino, thus including gravity. But the calculations yield annoying infinite results that do not bode well for

Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. A notebook (The Lost Notebook) of 120 handwritten pages by Ramanujan is accidentally discovered. This is Ramanujan’s contribution to string theory. To protect the original symmetry from being destroyed by quantum theory, a certain number of mathematical identities must be miraculously

Grun discovers phenotypic effects of non-nuclear genes (i.e. not present in chromosomes) such as genes in cellular organelles like mitochondria or free in the cytoplasm

Cohen discovers the existence of Jumping Genes in bacteria: genes that jump from species to species by invading the chromosome of another species.

At Laetoli in Tanzania, Mary Leakey discovers the footprints of a group (perhaps a family) of Australopithecus

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple in Cupertino, California; the symbol derives from Alan Turing’s obsession with the fairy tale Snow White, or from the many apples Steve and Steve ate in the garage that would later become the Apple Corporation. There was also

Steve Wozniak presents the Apple I to the Hoebrew Computer Club. After the presentation, Steve Jobs, who is with Wozniak, is approached by Paul Terrell, owner of a small chain of hardware stores, The Byte Shop. The next day, Jobs, barefoot, goes to Terrell’s store