VG

The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi are killed in the downing of their plane in Rwanda. The genocide of the Tutsis begins in Rwanda, but eventually the Tutsi forces prevail and Hutu refugees pour into Zaire.

North Korea’s “great leader” dies. Kim Il Sung, dictator of North Korea since 1948, dies of a heart attack at the age of 82. In the 1930s, he fought against the Japanese invasion and, at the recommendation of Soviet authorities, traveled to the USSR for

The Galileo probe is the only direct witness to the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter.

The Ulysses probe makes its first flyby of a solar pole.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy slams into Jupiter with 12 1-million-megaton impacts

The Food and Drug Administration approves the marketing of CalGene’s FlavrSavr tomato, the first genetically modified crop to be commercialized; FlavrSavr has been engineered to rot much more slowly.

Ayrton Senna crashed his Williams at the exit of a corner at Imola and died a few days later.

Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress is elected President of the Republic of South Africa

Mathematicians Arjen Lenstra and Mark Manasse, using the Internet and distributed computers, crack RSA129 with the Pomerance quadratic sieve. The smallest number that still resists decomposition now has over 160 digits.

Silvio Berlusconi returns to government after the Polo delle Liberta’s victory in the elections.

The Netscape browser was launched by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark.

NATO’s first military action. In the first military action in NATO’s 45-year history, U.S. fighters downed four Serbian warplanes violating the Bosnian no-fly zone on a bombing mission. Founded in 1949 to prevent Soviet aggression, in 1994 NATO offered to enforce UN resolutions aimed at

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that four Network Access Points (NAPs) will be built to replace the existing Internet backbone; they will be located in San Francisco (PacBell), Chicago (BellCore and Ameritech), New York (SprintLink), and Washington, DC (Metropolitan Fiber System).

Earthquake in Los Angeles, 7.0 on the Richter scale, 50 dead

The American probe Clementine detects the first clear signs of the abundance of water ice in the shadowed parts of the craters at the lunar South Pole

In Afghanistan, the extremist Islamic militia Taliban is formed and conquers Kandahar.

The fifth generation of CPUs is born: Intel Pentium Pro, PowerPC, Digital Alpha, AMD-K5 all monsters with up to tens of millions of transistors on a single chip, and clock frequencies of hundreds of MHz

Nobel Prize in Physics to Georges Charpak for the invention of particle detectors

Moscow, Russia. CIA Director Robert Gates enters the Kremlin for the first time, hosted by Boris Yeltsin. Among other things, he brings him the video of the burial at sea of the human remains of the K-129 sailors, recovered twenty years earlier by the CIA

Many mafia inmates subjected to the harsh prison regime (pursuant to Article 41-bis of Law No. 354 of July 26, 1975) are held in the Fornelli prison on Asinara Island in Sardinia. Among those held is Totò Riina. In the late 1980s and early 1990s,

Ukraine declares independence from the USSR

Coup-plotting junta defeated, Gorbachev returns

Red Army staged coup in Moscow: Yanayev becomes president, Gorbachev arrested, Yeltsin resists

Crimea. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Dacha. During the hostage-taking of the Communist Party Secretary, his subordinates, with the briefcase containing the missile launch codes, are in the house next door and realize that their equipment is no longer connected to the outside world. The civilian government has

While Mikhail Gorbachev is vacationing at his dacha in Crimea, a group calling itself the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” insists that Gorbachev either declare martial law or resign. After refusing to do either, Gorbachev is held hostage, and the KGB cuts off

2.56 pm. Tim Berners-Lee responds to a user of a newsgroup (alt.newsgroup) who asks “Is anyone aware of research or development effort in hypertext links enabling retrieval of information from multiple heterogeneous sources?”. He replies “The WorldWideWeb project aims to allow links to be made

Nobel Peace Prize to Aung San Suu Kyi

The Israeli military, using 42 non-stop flights on civilian and military aircraft, brought 14,310 Ethiopian Jews to Israel from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, including eight children born during the journey.

A hurricane in the Indian Ocean triggers a tidal wave, killing 350,000 people in Bangladesh.

The deployment of the Galileo probe’s high-gain antenna fails; in the dramatic months that followed, JPL sought a solution, which was found in new image compression algorithms, which would be temporarily stored on an emergency magnetic tape. To deploy the antenna, the motor was turned

In India, Monmohan Singh introduces structural economic reforms of a liberal nature; these reforms will lead to a boom in the Indian economy.

Two Marine divisions enter Kuwait

12 dead and 94 injured after an Italian Air Force jet crashed into a school in Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna).

The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe is signed in Paris by 22 parties. It limits and equalizes the conventional forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, effectively drastically reducing Soviet forces in particular. Soviet tanks are reduced from 41,000 to 13,000. The CFE

Germany. Chancellor Kohl opposes the renegotiation of Germany’s war debt. For the second time (the first in 1953), Western nations such as Italy and Greece agree to forgo German repayment. In 1953, in London, Western countries had written off 50% of Germany’s debt (accumulated from

Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, has equipped himself with a series of tools (Uniform Resource Locators – URLS, HyperText Transfer Protocol – HTTP, HyperText Markup Language – HTML), which will allow him to give life to the World Wide Web.

Georgia declares its independence from the USSR

United States. Peak paper consumption. Since 1990, paper consumption has steadily decreased, thanks to the dematerialization of goods and services, such as the smartphone. Humanity as a whole will experience peak paper consumption in 2013.

The Romanian government falls. The Romanian army’s defection to anti-communist protesters marks the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime. The end of 42 years of communism comes three days after government security forces opened fire on protesters in Timisoara. After the army’s defection, Ceausescu and his

A French DC-10 explodes in mid-flight, killing 170; after 10 years, the culprits will be found: six Libyans and Colonel Gaddafi.

1989: The decline of the Soviet space program begins. With glasnost, scientists’ and technicians’ complaints about the poorly managed program surface. With perestroika, in 1989, citizens elect party representatives who reduce the enormous expenditures for the space program. The failure of Phobos 2 doesn’t help…

The B2 Stealth is unveiled to the public in Palmdale, California.

The Soviet Buran orbiter is launched into orbit at an altitude of 257 kilometers, where it remains for two hours before successfully returning to Baikonur. The booster is the Energia.

United States. President Ronald Reagan signs a formal apology and an order to reimburse $20,000 to elderly survivors and their families of Japanese-American concentration camps during World War II.

The Chrysler M1-Abrams heavy tank, in the M1A1-HA (Heavy Armor) version, is equipped with heavy armor: armor with a layer of depleted uranium

San Francisco Symphony Hall, California. Steve Jobs launches the NeXT computer, with a magnetic-optical disk drive and no floppy disk. The computer will actually be commercially available only in early 1989. The market reaction will be lukewarm. Only 400 units will be sold per month,

Iranian jumbo jet mistakenly shot down in Persian Gulf

Berkeley, California. The first MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) are built.

Harvard’s Naom Elkies refutes Euler’s conjecture: there can be integer solutions to the equation x^4 + y^4 + z^4 = w^4. One solution is 2682440^4 + 15365639^4 + 18796760^4 = 20615673^4.

Olavi Kajander of the University of Kuopio in Finland notices ultrasmall particles inside many mammalian cells; about 50 nm in size, they are about a tenth the size of the smallest known ordinary bacteria; Kajander later hypothesizes that they are living organisms that thrive in

Montreal, Canada. The international agreement banning hydrofluorocarbons is signed. The treaty is ratified by 197 countries. The ozone hole is shrinking, and it is estimated that it will close completely by the middle of the 21st century. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan calls it “perhaps the

Ingrid Daubechies, a Belgian researcher and physicist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, discovered the perfect tool for wavelet theory: a mother wavelet with no tail at all (previous attempts in the early 1980s by Jean Morlet, Alexander Grossman, and Yves Meyer had

The Secretary of the Italian Communist Party Natta makes the first (and only, so far) self-criticism of a Western communist party for the positions taken on the Hungarian uprising of 30 years earlier

DNA sequencing methods are being automated

The Soviet Vega-1 probe passes 8,890 km from the nucleus of Halley’s Comet.

The back-propagation algorithm (Rumelhart et al.) allows the training of neural networks with multiple layers. Together with the paper by Hinton & Sejnowki (1986) linking machine learning with statistical mechanics, they revived interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Pixar produces the first completely digital short film: Luxo Jr, the office lamp is so successful that it becomes the Pixar logo.

The end of the world according to Pico della Mirandola in his “900 Theses”; in 1486 he wrote: “If it is allowed to man to conjecture about the end times, we can find, through the most secret ways of the cabala, that the consummation of

German epidemiologist Andreas Roland Grüntzig dies in a plane crash. He invented angioplasty to widen blocked arteries and thus helped save 15 million lives (estimate updated at the beginning of the 21st century).

Launch of the Japanese Suisei (comet) probe towards Halley’s Comet

English physicist David Deutsch publishes the article: “Quantum theory, the Church–Turing principle, and the universal quantum computer.” It lays the foundations of quantum computing, where quantum computers can handle multiple calculations simultaneously in a superposition of states. In Hugh Everett III’s interpretation, quantum computers do

Launch of the European Giotto probe towards Halley’s Comet by Ariane 1 from Kourou (French Guinea).

Hizbullah (or Hezbollah) hijacks an American airliner (TWA) and forces it to land in Beirut, where it remains on the runway for two weeks; an American naval officer on board is killed and his body thrown onto the runway; Israel agrees to release hundreds of

Konstantin Chernenko dies, succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev. Chernenko pays the price for his life as a chain smoker.

Chile. From the mid-1980s, the United States’ attitude changed rapidly, from being the lesser evil, as it was considered under Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, to a problem to be solved in the second half of Ronald Reagan’s term.

Israel withdraws from Lebanon

British Antarctic Survey reveals ozone hole with data from past 30 years

Nobel Prize in Physics to Carlo Rubbia and Simon Van Der Meer for the discovery of the W and Z particles of the weak nuclear interaction

Launch of Vega 1 which on its journey to Halley’s Comet launches a balloon into the atmosphere of Venus which transmits for 46 hours and a probe which transmits from the surface for 56 minutes

The foundation stone of the Rome mosque is laid

La Silla Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile. The meticulous work of Patrice Bouchet, Reinhold Hafner, and Jean Manfroid led to the discovery of Neptune’s thin, dark, and dusty rings, composed, unlike those of Saturn and Uranus, but similarly to those of Jupiter, of tiny particles, the

Boeing delivers first Apache helicopter

The Macintosh incorporated several of the innovations of the previous year’s LISA, including the Cut, Copy, Paste feature, invented by Larry Tesler.

Veldhoven, Netherlands. Philips spins off its in-house lithography division, which becomes ASML. By the early 21st century, it will become the world leader in EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) lithography machines, enabling chips with 2-3nm transistors.

The restrictive agreement binding Microsoft to Apple ends: Microsoft can release Windows, but it will take several months to develop a first, shaky, version 1.0: Win 1.0 will be commercially available only in November 1985.

Ronald Reagan orders the invasion of the island of Grenada. Cuban military forces had seized power. Cuban soldiers and Soviet advisors are captured during the invasion.

Lieutenant Colonel Stanislaw Petrof, a 44-year-old officer from the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union’s intelligence services, arrives at his command post at the Early Warning Center, where he coordinates Russia’s aerospace defense. However, that was supposed to be his night off. He was

Numerous scalar fields violating the strong energy condition are discovered at CERN: Alan Guth builds the inflationary theory of the Universe

At CERN in Geneva, Carlo Rubbia’s group discovers the W and Z particles responsible for the weak interaction.

Construction of CERN begins in Geneva: a 27 km ring