Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” is coming out in theaters.

Jimmy Wales, of Huntsville, Alabama, hired PhD student Larry Sanger to write the application for Nupedia, a user-editable online encyclopedia. But it wouldn’t be until two years later, with Ward Cunningham’s discovery of WikiWikiWeb, that they were able to give birth to Wikipedia.

The American satellite BATSE spots a gamma-ray burst, then the Italian Beppo-SAX resolves it better and transmits its exact position to a robotic telescope at Los Alamos, which within 20 seconds sees the flash in the optical beam as it fades; the following night the mighty Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea calculates the redshift: 7 billion light-years away! And for a few moments, it was the brightest object in the Universe.

Indonesian parliament appoints Muslim leader Abdurrahman Wahid as president despite Megawati Sukarnoputri’s party receiving the most votes.

United States. Peak fertilizer use. Beginning in 1999, agriculture began a sharp and steady decline in the amount of fertilizer and water used, along with a decline in cultivated area, despite the continued steady increase in tons of fertilizer each year, thanks to higher yields per hectare, thus reducing environmental impact. Peak fertilizer use occurred in 1999. The construction industry experienced a similar phenomenon: bricks, cement, sand, gravel, wood, and paper peaked in 2007, and then began to decline as a whole. From 2000, consumption of aluminum, nickel, copper, steel, and gold began to decline dramatically in the United States, despite continued growth in GDP. By 2020, consumption of these raw materials will return to the levels of the mid-1970s.

Tommy Flowers, creator of the Colossus computer, dies at the end of 1943. It was the first electronic computer in history. He died without ever receiving due recognition for it, due to its military secrecy until the early 21st century.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google Inc.

Steven Spielberg is the director of Saving Private Ryan

Venezuela. Socialist Hugo Chávez is elected president. He will remain so until his death in 2013, when his vice president, Nicolas Maduro, succeeds him. The Chávez-Maduro era, especially from the second decade onward, will bring catastrophic economic decline, accompanied by human suffering among the population, despite enormous oil wealth (Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world). GDP will fall by 35% from 2013 to 2017. This is the worst economic collapse ever seen in the Americas or Western Europe. Inflation reaches 18,000% at the beginning of 2018, and then 1,290,000% at the end of the same year. Emigration to Colombia stands at 5,000 people a day during the same period. Infant mortality exceeds that of civil war-torn Syria.

Apple launches the all-in-one iMac.

The United States has 10,763 nuclear weapons; the USSR has 10,764; a substantial parity decided by design.

England. The revolutionary contribution to the field of public key cryptography by Ellis, Cocks, and Williamson finally becomes public with a talk by Cocks. The enormous advances in this field had been made since 1965 at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham. Sadly, James Ellis had died a few days earlier, on November 25, 1997, at the age of 73. Meanwhile, in the United States, Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle were already famous for public key cryptography, while Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman were famous for RSA, the most practical implementation of public key cryptography. However, it would be discovered many years later that in England, they had been anticipated, but could not reveal it due to military secrecy. On April 1, 1965, cryptographer James Ellis joined the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, a top-secret office founded as a successor to Bletchley Park after the Second World War. Ellis had arrived having understood the basic idea: he suggested that Alice purposely add white noise to the communication and accurately measure it, thus remaining the only one who could remove it and read the message in plaintext. However, she needed a special “one-way function” that could only be inverted with special information. But since Ellis was not a mathematician, he couldn’t find it. That was until September 1973, when a mathematician, Clifford Cocks, a recent graduate of Cambridge University, joined the team. Cocks immediately realized that prime factorization was an excellent candidate. In little more than half an hour, a new hire on his first job, he congratulated himself: “Great, they gave me a problem and I solved it!” But he doesn’t fully understand the enormity of what he’s done. And in any case, he couldn’t have told anyone except his wife, since she also worked at GCHQ. Early the following year, cryptographer Malcolm Williamson also began working on the problem. Malcolm and Cliff were longtime friends, having attended the same Manchester Grammar School (whose motto is Sapere aude—dare to be wise). Williamson tried to prove Cocks wrong and that Public Key Cryptography was obviously impossible. He failed. In September 1982, Whitfield Diffie decided to travel to England at his own expense with his wife to verify the rumors circulating in the industry and speak face-to-face with James Ellis. They met in a pub. Whitfield’s wife, Mary, immediately realized she was dealing with a true

Hong Kong passes from Britain to China (with special status)

Progress resupply vehicle fails to rendezvous and dock with the Russian space station Mir and violently impacts it. Poor investment and poor quality are exposed. It’s the beginning of the end for the Russian space station. Vassili Tsibilev is forced to pilot the Progress M-34, using a new remote control (TORU), instead of the Ukrainian KURS. It seems to be arriving too slowly, so he accelerates it. He thinks it’s far away, but it’s already 150 meters away. “It’s already here!!!” Lazutkin shouts. It crashes. The cosmonauts feel their ears clogging: a bad sign! Tsibilev yells at Foale (in Russian) to get into the Soyuz module. Foale dives, but the Russians remain, trying to save Mir. Foale comes back up and helps them, immediately realizing that his Spektr module has been hit. They use a knife to cut all the cables connecting it, amid sparks and short circuits. The hatch doesn’t close immediately because the escaping air is holding it open. Fourteen minutes have passed. In 18 minutes, it would all be over. They use the Soyuz to reorient it toward the Sun, to get some electrical power. They slowly manage to recover it.

Russia launches a powerful (and ill-fated) space telescope. Aimed at the ground, a Proton rocket launches the anonymous Cosmos 2344 mission into orbit. It quickly becomes clear that it is an innovative military satellite: Araks. The case is studied by Geoff Perry (a British physics professor who in 1966 deduced the existence of the Plestesk cosmodrome by calculating the orbital parameters of observed Russian satellites). With an apogee of 3,000 km, it is a Cassegrain-type space telescope (like the Hubble HST) weighing over 6 tons, 7 meters long, and with a 2-meter mirror, but pointed at Earth and capable of focusing on a target for a long time. At the end of September 1997 (one-tenth of its lifespan), it was disabled due to a fuel tank leak. A second Araks is launched shortly thereafter (Cosmos 2392, 25 July 2002).

An international committee named element 105 as dubnium, not hahnium, as it had previously been informally called. And element 109 as meitnerium. In 1944, Otto Hahn had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments conducted in Germany that proved beyond any doubt that uranium fission under neutron bombardment, producing radioactive barium. In reality, the experiments had been conducted and designed by Lise Meitner, who agreed not to be named in the article, but published another under her name, which explained the theoretical basis of the experiment. Hahn, not Meitner, would win the Nobel Prize in 1944, because the majority of the committee in Stockholm were pro-German. Meitner would have (more than) a posthumous revenge, when a new element (109) was named in her name. Due to the complex rules of the naming committee, no other element can be called Hahnium, as it has already been proposed and rejected, in favor of Dubnium.

Operation Argo. U.S. state archives are open regarding Operation Argo, which 17 years earlier led to the release of American diplomats who escaped capture in Iran through the involvement of the Canadian Embassy and the cover-up of the science fiction film Argo.

China. Deng Xiaoping bequeathed to the members of the Chinese Politburo brief and succinct instructions for the future. They consist of two documents: one 24 characters long and one, for top-ranking officials, 12 characters long. Here’s the text: “Observe carefully; consolidate our position; calmly address problems; conceal our strengths and bide our time; learn to keep a low profile; never claim leadership.” And the second document: “The enemy troops are massed outside the walls. They are stronger than we are. We must remain primarily on the defensive.”

Man vs. Machine: the second match between Russian chess champion Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer. The first match was played in Philadelphia in 1996 and won by the Russian 4-2. The second, in May 1997 in New York City, was won by Deep Blue 3.5-2.5. It was the first time a computer defeated a world chess champion in a tournament-style match. In the second game of the New York tournament, Deep Blue at one point withdrew. Kasparov later tried to reconstruct Deep Blue’s final moves, but came to the disconcerting conclusion that Deep Blue had seen 20 moves ahead, a record (Kasparov himself admitted that his moment of glory was in a match in Holland in 1999, when he managed to see 15 moves ahead). Kasparov would never defeat Deep Blue again.