Interesting events from 1978

  • Oct 24, Pres. Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act. The main purpose of the act was to remove government control from commercial aviation and expose the passenger airline industry to market forces. Alfred Kahn (1917-2010) was the head of America’s Civil Aeronautics Board and the driving force behind the deregulation of air travel.
    says Geno: Before this date airline travel was enjoyable and reliable. Air travel has not been the same since.

  • Will Eisner (1917-2005) published “A Contract With God," the 1st serious book-length comic to describe itself as a graphic novel. (Econ, 10/30/04, p.86)(WSJ, 1/10/06, p.D10)

  • Jello Biafra (b.1958), born as Eric Reed Boucher in Boulder, Colo., moved to San Francisco, took on a new name and co-founded the Dead Kennedys, a punk band that soon played at the Mabuhay Gardens. (SFC, 6/14/08, p.E3)

  • Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson made a hit with their duet: "Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys." (SFC, 2/14/02, p.A2)

  • Joseph Phelps in California made a new red wine blend called Meritage from a blend of traditional Bordeaux grapes. (SFC, 10/2/96, zz1 p.4)(http://tinyurl.com/2q56ok)

  • Pres. Jimmy Carter signed the Cranston Act, which loosened restriction on home brewing and changed the federal excise taxes so that home brewers were given lighter levies than big brewers when they sold their product. (Economist, 9/8/12, p.65)
     says Geno: and kicked off the brewpub industry

  • Sewer construction along the southern Embarcadero unearthed an old sailing ship. In 1980 it was identified as the Lydia, a whaling boat built in 1840 in Rochester, Mass. (SFC, 8/5/05, p.F2)
  • An accountant (41) sued a waitress (31) at Vesuvio Cafe for failing to show up for a theater date. Judge Richard P. Figone (d.1998 at 63) ruled against him finding that "the promise to engage in a social relationship for one evening in exchange for affection and/or an evening at the theater is unenforceable under the law of contracts and torts. (SFC, 8/15/98, p.A24)
     Geno says: said accountant completely redefined the meaning of pathetic loser.
     
  • Radial keratotomy, popularized by the Russian ophthalmologist S.N. Fyodorov, was introduced to the US. (WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R21)


  • AT&T scientists conducted FCC-authorized cell-phone field trials in Chicago and Newark, NJ. (WSJ, 9/22/95, p.A-7)(www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/mobilephone.htm)

  • A paper by Leonard Adleman, Ron Rivest, and Adi Shamir was published titled A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems. It is widely known today by the group's initials RSA. (Wired, 8/95, p.117)
  • Hewlett-Packard began development of the inkjet printer, which eventually became a commercial success. (SFC, 7/26/04, p.F4)
  • Intel Corp. introduced the 8086 microprocessor. It was a 16-bit microprocessor with 29,000 transistors. (TAR, 1996, p.22) says Geno: my first assembly language
  • Kurt Godel (1906 -1978), Austrian mathematician, showed that within any logical system, no matter how rigidly structured, there are always questions that cannot be answered with certainty, contradictions that may be discovered, and errors that may lurk. (V.D.-H.K.p.340)

  • Robert Miner of Oracle Corp. developed the world’s 1st relational database program using IBM’s Structured Query Language. (SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)

  • Maurice Papon (1910-2007), French civil servant, began serving as the Budget Minister under PM Raymond Barre. He continued as Budget Minister until 1981, when evidence of his role in the Holocaust emerged. (SFC, 10/13/97, p.A12)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Papon)


  • In the Philippines Tony Tan Caktiong formed Jollibee after realizing that customers in his Manila ice cream parlor liked his soy and sugar seasoned burgers better than his sundaes. (http://jollibeephilippines.com/15/success-story-of-jollibee-in-the-philippines/#more-15)
  • These items were copied verbatim from :http://www.timelines.ws/20thcent/1978.HTML