1980: Events and Inventions

January, 1980. Over 5000 gold-diggers arrive in the interior Amazon jungle of Brazil, having heard about the discovery of a gold nugget at a place called Serra Pelada.

January 22, 1980. Andrei Sakharov, a prominent Soviet physicist and dissident, is jailed and exiled by the Soviet government.

“Yet our state is similar to a cancer cell—with its messianism and expansionism, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, the authoritarian structure of power, with a total absence of public control in the most important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, a closed society that does not inform its citizens of anything substantial, closed to the outside world, without freedom of travel or the exchange of information.” ~Andrei Sakharov

'Mugabe' photo (c) 2011, neal young - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/March 4, 1980. Robert Mugabe is elected prime minister of Zimbabwe. Mugabe continues to rule in Zimbabwe to this day, although 2008 elections forced him to share power with two other men.
I read Peter Godwin’s book, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, and was appalled by the tales of torture and suffering that make up a good part of that book.

April 12, 1980. Samuel Kanyon Doe takes over Liberia in a military coup, ending over 130 years of democratic presidential succession in that country. Doe and his associates kill President William R. Tolbert, Jr. and later execute a majority of Tolbert’s cabinet and other government officials. “President” Doe will rule Liberia for the next ten years until his assassination in 1990.

April 25, 1980. An American attempt to rescue the 53 hostages being held by the Iranians in the American embassy in Tehran fails when an American helicopter crashes in the Iranian desert. The rescue attempt had already been called off because of equipment failure, but the helicopter crash resulted in the deaths of eight American soldiers who were in the process of withdrawing from Iran when the crash occurred.

May 22, 1980. Pac-Man (the best-selling arcade game of all time) is released in Japan.

'PAC-MAN CE_screenshot7' photo (c) 2007, Gamerscore Blog - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

September, 1980. Polish workers win the right to organize trade unions and set up the central organization called Solidarity under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. Solidarity is the first non-communist trade union in a Warsaw Pact country.

September 23, 1980. Iraqi troops attack western Iran. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein hopes to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos in Iran and and has his army attack without formal warning. The Abadan oil refinery is blazing after being bombarded by Iraqi artillery and bombs. The United States and the Soviet Union are both remaining neutral in the conflict.

November 4, 1980. Republican challenger and former Governor Ronald Reagan of California defeats incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter to become the 40th president of the United States of America.

November, 1980. The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn, when it flies within 77,000 miles of the planet’s cloud-tops and sends the first high resolution images of the world back to scientists on Earth.

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