1993: The EU Becomes Reality
• Date: Nov. 1
• Location: Brussels
The Treaty of the European Union, also known as the Maastricht Treaty, goes into effect in November, after a rough series of political wrangling that, among other concessions, allows the U.K. and Denmark to opt out of the common euro currency. The treaty opens the way to removing border controls among member states and invites new members to join the union.
1994: Amazon.com is Born
• Date: July 5
• Location: Seattle
With an initial aim of becoming an online bookstore, Jeff Bezos and a handful of angel investors launch Amazon.com, just as e-commerce is about to take off. In 2020, after expanding from books to the so-called “Everything Store” and growing a business selling cloud services to companies like Netflix and Instagram, Bezos would be the world’s richest man.
1995: Domestic Terror Strikes Oklahoma
• Date: April 19
• Location: Oklahoma City
In the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history, anti-government radicals Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. They time the truck-bomb attack for a weekday morning in order to maximize casualties. For the murder of at least 168 people, including 19 children who were in a childcare center in the building, and the injury of hundreds of others, an unremorseful McVeigh is executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Nichols is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
1996: The Dawn of Cloning
• Date: July 5
• Location: Midlothian, Scotland, U.K.
Dolly the Sheep enters the annals of bioengineering when scientists at Scotland's Roslin Institute become the first to not only successfully clone a mammal, but also the first to do so using an adult cell rather than an embryonic one. After 277 so-called cell fusions that created 29 embryos, the teams managed to turn an udder cell into a nearly complete biological carbon copy of the sheep from which it came.
1997: Machine Tops Chess Champ
• Date: May 11
• Location: New York City
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been serious areas of study (and hype) for over 60 years. In 1997, one of the most significant victories for silicon logic came when IBM's Deep Blue became the first machine to beat a world chess champion. The the refrigerator-sized computer beat Garry Kasparov twice and tied him three times in a six-game match.
1998: The Age of Google Begins
• Date: Sept. 4
• Location: Menlo Park, California
With seed money from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others, Stanford University Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin launch the search engine Google. The digital advertising behemoth Google Inc., now Alphabet Inc., is a $1.104 trillion company with several subsidiaries, including video-sharing platform YouTube; autonomous-car development company Waymo; and X, the company’s research and development division.
1999: NATO's First Independent Strike
• Date: March 24
• Location: Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
In order to expel Serbian forces from Kosovo during the Kosovo War, NATO forces initiate their first-ever military campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Montenegro and Serbia) without U.N. Security Council authorization as Russia and China oppose the attack. The NATO air strikes are aimed at stopping an onslaught against ethnic Albanians by the government of Slobodan Milošević. The NATO attacks last nearly three months, culminating in the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo.
2000: International Space Station Opens
• Date: Nov. 2
• Location: Low earth orbit
Commanders Bill Shepherd from the United States and Yuri Gidzenko of Russia, along with Russian flight engineer Sergei Krikalev become the first temporary residents of the International Space Station two years after the first component of the research center was put into low-Earth orbit about 250 miles above sea level. Since that first crew, there have been 229 other visitors to the ISS, some of them multiple times, led by 146 from the United States and 47 from Russia.
PUBLISHED: |
No comments:
Post a Comment