1980 in science

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The year 1980 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Contents 1 Astronomy and space exploration 2 Computing 3 Geophysics 4 Medicine 5 Awards 6 Births 7 Deaths 8 References

Astronomy and space exploration

• November 12 – Voyager program: The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn when it flies within 77,000 miles (124,000 km) of the planet's cloud-tops and sends the first high resolution images of the world back to scientists on Earth.

Computing

• Usenet established at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.^[1]
• July – Microsoft's Bill Gates agrees to create an operating system for the new IBM Personal Computer. In September, David Bradley becomes one of the "original 12" engineers working on the project (under Don Estridge) and is responsible for the ROM BIOS code^[2] and for developing the Control-Alt-Delete command.^[3]

Geophysics

• June 6 – Luis and Walter Alvarez with Frank Asaro and Helen Michels propose the Alvarez hypothesis, that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by the impact of a large asteroid 65 million years ago, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.^[4]

Medicine

• The much-enlarged third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), produced under the control of Robert Spitzer, is published.^[5][6][7]
• Global campaign to eradicate Dracunculiasis (Guinea worm disease) begins at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – James Watson Cronin, Val Logsdon Fitch
  • Chemistry – Paul Berg, Walter Gilbert, Frederick Sanger
  • Medicine – Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset, George D. Snell
• Turing Award – C. A. R. Hoare

Births

Deaths

• January 3 – Joy Adamson (b. 1910), wildlife conservationist.
• January 8 – John Mauchly (b. 1907), co-inventor of the ENIAC computer.
• February 7 – Secondo Campini (b 1904), Italian jet engine pioneer.
• May 28 – Rolf Nevanlinna (b. 1895), mathematician.
• June 18 – Kazimierz Kuratowski (b. 1896), Polish mathematician.
• July 1 – C. P. Snow (b. 1905), physicist and novelist
• October 21 – Hans Asperger (b. 1906), Austrian pediatrician.
• November 4 – Elsie MacGill (b. 1905), aeronautical engineer, "Queen of the Hurricanes".
• December 16 – Hellmuth Walter (b. 1900), engineer and inventor.

References