Beijing, China. John Bardeen (co-inventor of the transistor and Nobel Prize winner for it, and then again for superconductivity) arrives at the airport in the Chinese capital. In March 1978, Den Xiaoping will place semiconductors at the center of his agenda.

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP): launch of the Saturn IB SA-210, this was the first meeting in orbit between crews from two different nations (three Americans and two Soviets), an even more important fact given the tense relations between the two superpowers.

Sunday. 10:00 PM. Steve Wozniak, after working all day at his post at HP, goes home for a quick dinner and then returns to work. At 10:00 PM, he finally types on the keyboard, and the letters appear on the screen… Wozniak is impressed: it’s the first time a keyboard and monitor have been integrated into a hobbyist computer. It’s the first prototype of what will become the Apple I personal computer.

Cambodia. Phnom Penh is conquered by communist rebels: Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Two million people are forced to leave the cities to work in the fields.

King Faisal is assassinated. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, King Faisal is shot dead by his nephew, Prince Faisal Ibn Musaid. Son of King Ibn Saud, Faisal had fought in the military campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s that gave rise to modern Saudi Arabia. He later served as his country’s ambassador to the United Nations and in 1953, upon the accession of his elder brother Saud, was appointed prime minister. In 1964, King Saud was forced to abdicate, and Faisal became absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia. He sought to modernize the nation and offered financial and moral support to anti-Israeli forces in the Middle East. In 1975, Faisal was assassinated for reasons that remain unclear. He was succeeded by Crown Prince Khalid.

Journalist Jack Anderson reveals Project Azorian (the recovery of the Soviet submarine K-129) on the nationally popular Mutual Radio Network show. He reruns it twice that same evening. The cover is blown. Project Azorian aimed to return to the ocean floor to recover the submarine’s stern, but at this point it will be abandoned.

Menlo Park, California. In Gordon French’s garage, a meeting of about thirty electronics enthusiasts is being held. The topic of the day is the new Altair. The meeting is convened by Fred Moore. The club is called the Homebrew Computer Club. Among the attendees is Steve Wozniak, who works at Hewlett Packard after dropping out of college. His father is a Lockheed engineer who loves explaining electronics to colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. In Menlo Park, the idea of combining a keyboard, a screen, and an affordable microprocessor system takes shape. That same month, Bill Gates, after Paul Allen has accepted the job in Albunquerque, returns to finish his sophomore year at Harvard. He then goes to Albunquerque to study with Allen, then returns to Harvard for two more semesters, and, to make a long story short, he ultimately fails to graduate, but only by a hair. He receives an honorary degree from Harvard 30 years later…

Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and Monte Davidsson complete the first BASIC interpreter, one of the first software packages for the Altair 8800. Allen takes it to Ed Roberts of Altair. It takes him 10 minutes to load the software into the machine. The code was developed on a software emulation of the Altair 8800, which ran on a PDP-10, so this was the first time they tried it on a real Altair. After 10 minutes, the screen asks, “MEMORY SIZE?” Allen writes “7168,” and Altair says, “OK.” Allen writes, “PRINT 2+2.” Altair responds, “4.” Roberts calls Allen into his office, and they sign the contract for all the Altair machines. Roberts later offers Allen a job as software director, and he accepts, leaving his secure job at Honeywell to move to Albuquerque, a city he only recently learned is not in Arizona.

Paul Allen, waving his copy of Popular Electronics with an Altair 8800, shouts at Bill Gates, “Hey, this thing is happening without us!” Bill is persuaded to leave Harvard to write software for Altair. They write a BASIC interpreter. Then he calls Altair, giving the name Paul Allen, trying to alter his voice, because he knew Paul would be the one to go to Altair. Ed Roberts, from Altair, responds that he’s received many calls about phantom BASIC interpreters, but none of them work, and tells him that the first person to walk through his door with a working one will get the contract. In a few weeks, Gates and Allen complete the job, with the help of Monte Davidoff, a boy from Milwaukee.

Paul Allen, as soon as he sees the new issue of Popular Electronics, with the Altair 8800 on the cover, is excited and curious. He buys it for 75 cents and rushes to bring it to his high school friend Bill Gates’s Harvard dorm. Bill, unlike Paul, has never cared much about hardware. For Bill, the magic is the software. When he sees that cover, he’s convinced he must create software for personal computers and make hardware a commodity. It will be the best idea of his life.

OLIVETTI presents the SIGMA robot for assembly operations, one of the first robotic applications in this sector

Benoit Mandelbrot: Geometric Theory of Fractals

Death of Spanish dictator Franco, beginning of the democratization process

40 degrees North, 180 degrees West, North Pacific. The CIA’s Hughes Glomar Explorer begins the lengthy procedure of lowering the Clementine tool to collect K-129 from the ocean floor.

NASA purchased a Boeing 747 aircraft from American Airlines to transport the Space Shuttle from one place to another; the alternative, proposed by Lokheed, was to use two C-5As side by side and attached together.

40 degrees North, 180 degrees West, North Pacific. The CIA ship Hughes Glomar Explorer has company: the radar ship Chazhma (which set sail from Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka to support a Soyuz launch) arrives. A helicopter lifts off from the Soviet ship, flies closely over the CIA ship (whose compartment containing Clementine, for lifting the K-129—PL-574 for the Russians—has been appropriately covered) and takes photographs. The Americans respond by also taking photographs of the helicopter and the ship… The official reason for the American ship’s presence is to test new techniques for collecting manganese nodules for the Hughes Corporation. Chazhma will leave the site four days later.

The CIA ship Hughes Glomar Explorer arrives 40 degrees north, 180 degrees west, at the site of the Soviet K-129 sinking. It positions itself and maintains its position actively through early use of GPS (the first satellites have just been launched). The GPS receiver fills most of a container. Then it begins interrogating a transponder left on the ocean floor next to the submarine at a depth of 5,500 meters. The transponder responds immediately. It is battery-powered and housed in a metal box filled with kerosene to prevent it from being compressed by the enormous pressure.

The charm quark is discovered

India detonates its first nuclear device: 10-15Kton

Israel. Maalot massacre: A Palestinian attack kills 21 Israeli students.