12583
* Integrated Electronics (Intel) introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Selling for around $200USD, the 1/6" x 1/8" chip has the approximate computing power of an entire 1946 era ENIAC computer.
* "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" debuts on CBS as a mid-season replacement.
* The first digital watch is designed by Pulsar.
* Apollo 17 is the last manned mission to the moon for 30 years (longer than that!).
* "Duel" airs as a Saturday Night Movie on CBS. Telling the tale of harried driver Dennis Weaver's battle against an imposing tractor-trailer rig whose driver he never sees, it is director Steven Spielberg's first stint at long-form film-making (and is coming soon to DVD).
* The term 'Silicon Valley' is coined by Don Hoefler in a trade journal.
* The Coca-Cola company airs thier "Hilltop" TV ad, featuring a group of young people on a hillside in Italy singing the company's version of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", which becomes one of the most recognized corporate jingles of all time. 1971 also sees the "Crying Indian" anti-litter ad from environmental organization Keep America Beautiful, new slogans from McDonalds (You deserve a break today) and American Express (Don't leave home without it), and introduces Life cereal with the cry "Hey Mikey! He likes it!".
* CBS TV series "Hogan's Heroes" ends its six year run.
* Anik I, Canada's first telecommunications satellite, is launched. It can relay 12 channels simultaneously.
* IBM reaches over $2 billion in sales.
* Warner Bros. releases Stanley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange", which earns an X rating in US theatres (these days it only carries an R rating, and is notable because it used the US version of the book, which only had 20 chapters. the full version has 21, and a very different ending).
* Kenback I, the first personal computer, is built by John Blankenbaker. Input is made by a series of switches, and output comes in the form of blinking lights above them.Priced at $750USD, only 40 are eventually sold.
* The Ford Pinto rolls off the assembly line and into automotive infamy when it is discovered later that its faulty design makes the fuel tank a veritable molotov cocktail in low-speed rear-end collisions. A recall is finally ordered in 1978.
* The first "memory disk", an 200K 8" flexible storage disk soon to be known as the "floppy", is invented by IBM engineer Alan Shugart. He later founds premiere media storage company Seagate (floppies eventually shrank to 3.5 inches with a capacity of 2.88 megabytes, but the 1.44 High Density format is the one still most widely used).
* "Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138: 4EB", an award-winning student film short made at USC in 1966, is redone to feature length size as simply "THX 1138" by its creator...George Lucas.
* While attending high school, Steve Jobs meets and befriends fellow co-worker Steve Wozniak at their part-time job at Hewlett-Packard.
* The moon rover is deployed on the lunar surface during the Apollo 15 mission.
* Mid-season replacement series "All in the Family" premieres on CBS. It runs for nine seasons, hitting #1 in the ratings for five of them.
* ARPAnet designers choose "@" to separate user names from domain names as they refine email (electronic mail) delivery. The net now includes 50 universities.
* Novel "Cyborg", by former Air Force pilot and NASA PR agent Martin Caidin, is published by Arbor House Publishing. It and three other subsequently published books by Caidin later become the inspiration for ABC's hit TV series "The Six Million Dollar Man".
* Programming language C is created by Dennis Ritchie (as based on B, and the original language of choice for UNIX).
* Having been sold by Colonel Sanders seven years earlier for US$ 2 million, KFC Corporation is bought by Heublein Inc. for US$ 285 million.
* The first hand-held scientific calculator HP-30 is debuted by Hewlett-Packard Company for $350 USD (personally I always used TI calculators, as do a bunch of people in schools around here still
).
* Phase One of Walt Disney World, situated inside a total of 43 square miles of swamplands in central Florida, opens to the public. Built by 9000 workers at a cost of 400 million dollars, it is the largest private construction project in the modern world (Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent is a hilarious and at time scary account at what goes on in Disney World).
* The compact disc is invented by Klass Compaan of Philips Research.
* Gene Wilder trips out a generation of kids as Willy Wonka in the movie version of Roald Dahl's classic children's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".
* Steve Jobs begins classes at Reed College in Portland, Oregon as a Physics major. He drops out one semester later.
* Richard Adams' seminal fantasy tail "Watership Down" is released by London based book publisher Rex Collings.
* The first ever 8-bit processor, the 8008, is introduced by Intel (and now everybody's trying to move to 64-bit processors, though workstations have had them for years from SUN, Digital/Compaq and SGI).