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 animal.

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 diskette drives.

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 exploit the power of his turbo, pulling away on the straight and then holding his own on the twisties. A tight train of five cars forms. The Canadian displays skill and composure, holding off Laffitte’s assaults and winning his sixth and final race. Villeneuve’s car also runs out of fuel on the honor lap, but he manages to restart it and activate the trim tabs to bring the car back within the regulation limits.

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, but no one bothered to seriously verify their authenticity); perhaps only Adolf Hitler could exert such hypnotic influence.

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 here. The two parts of the bomb are located in separate compartments of the container and buried in the sand.

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. Nuclear weapons are needed.

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 the warhead fails to explode. Airman David Livingstone, who was near the missile trying to resolve the problem, is killed by the explosion.

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 the silo. It’s armed with a 9-ton W-53 thermonuclear warhead, the most powerful in the American arsenal: about three times the entire potential used in World War II, including the atomic bombs in Japan. During maintenance, Powell drops a tool. He tries to catch it, but it falls hundreds of feet and hits the aluminum fuselage of the missile far below, puncturing it. Fuel starts leaking out. It’s a problem. When Powell runs up to the control station to his colleague Kennedy, he says, “Jeff, I’m fucked up like you wouldn’t believe!”

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 door to evacuate the rest of the crew, but in this case the gunner had already done so and was already running like hell across the runway. One wing of the plane is engulfed in flames. The B-52 is carrying eight 200-kton SRAMs and four Mark-28 thermonuclear bombs. The crew escapes. Engine number 5 is on fire. Luckily, the wind blows the flames toward the tail of the plane, away from the fuel-filled wing and, above all, away from the bomb bay containing tens of millions of tons of nuclear explosive. Tim Griffis, one of the firefighters with extensive B-52 experience, arrives on the scene and offers to go into the cockpit to try to close the fuel valve and activate the auxiliary battery to put out the fire, even in the midst of the smoke. The attempt succeeds.

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 IBM. Even though Microsoft at the time had a turnover of $7.6 million and IBM $30 billion, Microsoft insists on retaining ownership of the OS, which IBM will make a global standard. The agreement stipulates the non-exclusive use of PC-DOS. Gates will, in fact, sell the same OS to other companies, under the name MS-DOS. And under the agreement, Gates retains ownership of the source code. This prohibits IBM from modifying the software, for example, to make it proprietary and shut down the whole thing, thus allowing the emergence of IBM PC clones and further expanding the MS-DOS installed base.

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 years, all three final), and Gilberto Cavallini (life sentence in 2020, the ninth of his criminal career) will be convicted for the massacre. New evidence will also emerge regarding Paolo Bellini, an extremist from Avanguardia Nazionale. This is the most serious terrorist attack in Italy, second in Europe only to the 2004 massacre at Madrid’s Atocha train station, which killed 191 people.

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.