1984

This page is about the year 1984. For other uses of 1984, see 1984 (disambiguation).

1984 is a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar.

Events

January

• January 1 - Brunei becomes a fully independent state.
• January 1 - AT&T is broken up into 22 independent units.
• January 5 - Richard Stallman starts developing GNU.
• January 7 - Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
• January 9 - Clara Peller is featured in the "Where's the Beef?" commercial campaign for Wendy's for the first time.
• January 10 - The United States and the Vatican establish full diplomatic relations.
• January 23 - Pop star Michael Jackson's scalp is seriously burned by pyrotechnics during filming of a Pepsi commercial.
• January 24 - The first Apple Macintosh goes on sale.

February

• February 1 - Medicare comes into effect (Aus).
• February 2 - Melbourne Age publishes phone taps incriminating an unknown judge.
• February 3 - Space Shuttle Challenger is launched on the tenth space shuttle mission.
• February 6 - A bomb blast wrecks the Belrose Sydney home of high court judge Richard Gee. High Court Judge, Justice Lionel Murphy is named in parliment as the judge referred to in the Age tapes.
• February 7 - Astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart make the first untethered space walk.
• February 9 - Soviet leader Yuri Andropov dies.
• February 13 - Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
• February 18 - Vatican and Italian government sign new concordant changing Roman Catholic as the official religion.
• February 26 - United States Marines pull out of Beirut,Lebanon.
• February 29 - Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau announces his retirement.

March

• March 5 - Iran accuses Iraq of the use of chemical weapons - UN condemns the use on March 30.
• March 5 - Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi orders an attack on the Golden Temple, the Sikh holy spot.
• March 6 - Twelve month long strike in British coal industry begins See UK Miners' Strike (1984-1985).
• March 14 - Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams and three others are seriously injured in a gun attack by the UVF.
• March 16 - CIA station chief stationed in Beirut, William Buckley, is kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists and later dies in captivity.
• March 22 - Teachers at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California are charged with Satanic ritual abuse of the children in the school. The charges were later dropped as completely unfounded.
• March 23 - Sarah Tisdall, the young British civil servant who told The Guardian newspaper that cruise missiles were coming to Britain, is sentenced to six months imprisonment.
• March 24 - Wran Government re-elected in NSW for a 4th term.
• March 25 - Air Holland files for bankruptcy when unproven allegations of marijuana abuse by their pilots led them to bankruptcy.

April-June

• April 4 - President Ronald Reagan calls for an international ban on chemical weapons.
• April 12 - Palestinian gunmen take Israeli bus number 300 hostage. Israeli special forces storm the bus freeing the hostages (1 hostage, 2 hijackers killed). 2 other hijackers were captured and then killed in secret service interrogations, causing a major scandal and secret service upheaval (Kav 300 affair).
• April 17 - WPC Yvonne Fletcher is shot dead by a secluded gunman during a siege outside the Libyan Embassy in London in the event known as the 1984 Libyan Embassy Siege.
• April 19 - Advance Australia Fair is proclaimed as Australia's national anthem, and green and gold as the national colours.
• April 25 - End of term for Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah Al-Mustain Billah ibni Almarhum Sultan Sir Abu Bakar Riayatuddin Al-Muadzam Shah as the 7th Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.
• April 26 - Baginda Almutawakkil Alallah Sultan Iskandar Al-Haj ibni Almarhum Sultan Ismail, Sultan of Johor becomes the 8th Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.
• May 2 - The Liverpool International Garden Festival opens in Liverpool.
• May 8 - The Soviet Union announces that it will boycott the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.
• May 8 - Denis Lortie kills three government employees in the National Assembly of Quebec building.
• May 11 - A transit of Earth from Mars takes place.
• May 14 - The one dollar coin is introduced in Australia.
• June 5 - The Indian government begins Operation Blue Star, the planned attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
• June 6 - Indian troops storm the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Sikh's holiest shrine, killing an estimated 1000 people.
• June 8 - A deadly F5 tornado nearly destroys the town of Barneveld, Wisconsin, killing nine people, injuring nearly 200, and causing over $25m in damage.
• June 20 - The biggest exam shake-up in the British education system, for over 10 years, is announced with O-level and CSE exams to be replaced by a new exam, the GCSE.
• June 22 - The official name of the Turkish city Urfa is changed into Sanliurfa.
• June 22 - Inaugural flight of Virgin Atlantic.
• June 30 - John Turner becomes Canada's seventeenth prime minister.

July-September

• July 9 - Lightning sets fire to York Minster.
• July 18 - In San Ysidro, California, 41-year-old James Oliver Huberty sprays a McDonald's restaurant with gun-fire killing 21 people before being shot dead by police.
• July 21 - In Jackson, Michigan, a factory robot crushes a worker against a safety bar in apparently the first robot-related death in the United States.
• July 23 - Vanessa Williams becomes the first Miss America to resign when she surrenders her crown after nude photos of her appeared in "Penthouse" magazine.
• July 25 - Salyut 7 Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a space walk.
• August 1 - Australian Banks are de-regulated.
• August 4 - The African republic Upper Volta changes its name to Burkina Faso.
• August 16 - Carmaker John De Lorean is acquitted of all eight counts of possessing and distributing cocaine due to entrapment.
• August 21 - Half a million people in Manila demonstrate against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos.
• August 21 - Federal Budget 1st televised (Aus).
• September 2 7 people shot dead and 12 wonded in bikie shootout between rival bikie gangs the Bandidos and Comancheros in the Sydney suburb of Milperra.
• September 5 - STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery lands after its maiden voyage.
• September 5 - Western Australia becomes the last Australian state to abolish capital punishment.
• September 17 - Brian Mulroney becomes Canada's eighteenth prime minister.
• September 26 - United Kingdom and People's Republic of China sign initial agreement to return Hong Kong to China in 1997.

October

• October 5 - Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian in space, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger (41-6).
• October 11 - Aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan becomes the first American woman to perform a space walk.
• October 12 - Brighton bombing (attempt to assassinate the British Cabinet by the IRA).
• October 19 - A Polish Priest Jerzy Popieluszko is kidnapped and found dead two days later.
• October 31 - Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated by two Sikh security guards (riots soon broke out in New Delhi and some 2,700 innocent Sikhs were killed).

November-December

• November 2 - Capital punishment: Velma Barfield becomes the first woman executed in the United States since 1962.
• November 6 - Ronald Reagan defeats Walter F. Mondale in the U.S. presidential election. Reagan carries 49 states and Mondale manages to win only his home state of Minnesota by a mere 3,761 vote margin and the District of Columbia, an automatic given.
• November 19 - A series of explosions at the PEMEX petroleum storage facility at San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico City ignites a major fire and kills about 500 people.
• November 25 - 36 of Britain and Ireland's top pop musicians gathered in a Notting Hill studio to form Band Aid and recorded the song "Do They Know It's Christmas" in order to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
• November 26 - Fmr NSW Corrective services Minister Rex Jackson appears in Court on conspirisy charges for the early release of Prisoners
• November 28 - Over 250 years after their deaths, William Penn and his wife Hannah Callowhill Penn are made Honorary Citizens of the United States.
• November 30 - The Tamil Tigers begin the purge of the Sinhalese from North and East Sri Lanka - 127 killed.
• December 1 - The first half of the Manila LRT opens from Baclaran to Central Terminal.
• December 2 - Hawke Government re-elected with a reduced majority.
• December 3 - Bhopal Disaster: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, kills more than 2,000 people outright and injures anywhere from 150,000 to 600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
• December 3 - British Telecom privatised.
• December 19 - The People's Republic of China and United Kingdom signs the Sino-British Joint Declaration which concerns the future of Hong Kong.
• December 22 - Four African-American youths, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, James Ramseur, and Darrell Cabey, board an express train in The Bronx borough of New York City. They attempt to rob Bernhard Hugo Goetz, who proceeds to shoot them. The event starts a debate about urban crime, which was a plague in 1980s America, in cities all over the United States.
• December 31 - Rajiv Gandhi becomes prime minister of India.

Unknown dates

• Ethiopian famine begins.
• A peace agreement between Kenya and Somalia was signed in the Egyptian capital Cairo in December 1984. With this agreement, in which Somalia officially renounced its historical territorial claims, relations between the two countries began to improve.

Year in topic

• 1984 in film
  • January 16 - A Nos Amours
  • May 23 - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom starring Harrison Ford
  • June 1 - Star Trek III: The Search for Spock starring William Shatner as Admiral James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy both as Spock and directing.
  • June 8 - Ghostbusters
  • September 19 - Amadeus
  • September 21 - Places in the Heart
  • October 26 - Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator
  • November 2 - The Killing Fields
  • November 26 - Filming starts on Back to the Future.
  • December 5 - Beverly Hills Cop starring Eddie Murphy
  • December 14 - Dune starring Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Usul Muad'Dib Atreides, Patrick Stewart (of Excalibur fame) as Gurney Halleck
• 1984 in literature
  • The New International Version of the Bible is published.
  • The influential cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, by William Gibson, is published in March.
• 1984 in music
  • The influential rap group, the Ultramagnetic MCs, form in the Bronx.
  • Iron Maiden released Powerslave, their 5th studio album and their 3rd with front-man Bruce Dickinson showing the world the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was there to stay.
  • Metallica released Ride the Lightning.
  • Van Halen released 1984, their last album with lead singer David Lee Roth.
  • Prince released Purple Rain.
• 1984 in rail transport
  • Southern Pacific Railroad and Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway attempt to merge but the merger is denied by the Interstate Commerce Commission
• 1984 in sports
  • January 14 - Ray Mancini stops 2 time world champion Bobby Chacon in the third round of a long awaited boxing fight, to retain the WBA's world Lightweight title.
  • January 22 - Super Bowl XVIII Los Angeles Raiders (38) def. Washington Redskins (9)
  • January 27 - Carl Lewis beats his previous indoor world jumping record of 8.56 m (28 ft 1 in) with a 8.79 m (28 ft 10.25 in) jump.
  • February 8 - 1984 Winter Olympics open in Sarajevo
  • May 19 - The NHL's Edmonton Oilers win the Stanley Cup defeating the New York Islanders 5-2 at Edmonton and ending the Islanders dynasty. The first in Oilers club history and of a new dynasty.
  • July 4 - Seven-time Winston Cup Champion Richard Petty won a historic 200th win at Daytona International Raceway. The record remains unbroken.
  • Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California, USA
  • Baseball - The Detroit Tigers start the season 35-5 on their way to a World Series victory.
• 1984 in television
  • January 28 - Singer Michael Jackson's hair catches fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial
  • March 16 - Colin Baker takes over the role of The Doctor in the famous British sci-fi series Doctor Who.
  • September 19 - Highway to Heaven debuts on NBC.
  • September 20 - The Cosby Show debuts on NBC.
  • September 20 - Who's the Boss debuts on ABC.
  • September 28 - Miami Vice debuts on NBC.
  • September 30 - Murder, She Wrote debuts on CBS.
  • December 28 - The soap opera The Edge of Night airs its final episode on ABC.
  • The current version of Jeopardy! debuts on NBC.
• 1984 in video gaming and computing
  • January 22 - The Apple Macintosh, the first consumer computer to use a computer mouse and graphical user interface, is introduced by Apple Computer corporation in a Super Bowl commercial evoking images from George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
  • January 24 - The first Apple Macintosh goes on sale.

Births

• January 1 - Holly Dunaway, professional boxer
• January 3 - Maya Ababadjani, actress
• January 13 - Eleni Ioannou, Greek judo champion (d. 2004)
• January 15 - Megan Quann, swimmer
• January 26 - Rebecca Ritters, actress
• January 26 - Luo Xuejuan, swimmer
• January 29 - Natalie du Toit, South African swimmer
• February 10 - Kim Hyo Jin, Korean actress
• February 12 - Alexandra Dahlström, actress
• February 25 - Xing Huina, Chinese athlete
• February 28 - Karolina Kurkova, supermodel
• March 20 - Christy Carlson Romano, actress
• March 20 - Nomura Yuka, Japanese actress
• March 28 - Nikki Sanderson, British actress
• April 3 - Allana Slater, Australian gymnast
• April 8 - Kirsten Storms, American actress
• April 10 - Mandy Moore, singer, actress
• April 11 - Kelli Garner, American actress
• April 13 - Kris Britt, Australian cricketer
• April 17 - Rosanna Davison, Irish model
• April 18 - America Ferrera, actress
• April 22 - Michelle Ryan, British actress
• April 23 - Alexandra Kosteniuk, chess player
• April 29 - Taylor Cole, American actress/model
• April 29 - Lina Krasnoroutskaya, Russian tennis player/commentator
• May 17 - Christine Robinson, Canadian water polo player
• May 29 - Carmelo Anthony, NBA star
• May 31 - Jason Smith, Australian actor
• June 10 - Selian A. Diaz, Puerto Rican soldier
• June 11 - Vagner Love, Brazilian footballer
• June 13 - Berangere Schuh, French archery star
• July 11 - Tanith Belbin, US skater
• August 12 - Sherone Simpson, Jamaican athlete
• September 4 - Lauren Bush, model
• September 7 - Vera Zvonareva, tennis player
• September 14 - Adam Lamberg, actor (Lizzie McGuire)
• September 15 - Prince Harry of Wales, English prince
• September 23 - Anneliese van der Pol, actress
• September 27 - Avril Lavigne, Canadian singer/songwriter
• September 28 - Helen Oyeyemi, British novelist
• September 30 - Megan Ewing, American model
• October 3 - Ashlee Simpson, singer, actress
• October 10 - Chiaki Kuriyama, actress
• October 14 - Santino Quaranta, American soccer player
• October 17 - Michelle Ang, Australian actress
• October 26 - Sasha Cohen, American figure skater
• October 27 - Kelly Osbourne, singer
• November 7 - Amelia Vega, Miss Universe 2003
• November 9 - Delta Goodrem, actress, singer
• November 12 - Sandara Park, Korean entertainer
• November 21 - Jena Malone, actress
• November 22 - Scarlett Johansson, actress
• November 28 - Andrew Bogut, Australian basketball player
• December 30 - LeBron James, NBA star

Deaths

January-June

• January 7 - Alfred Kastler, French physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902)
• January 20 - Johnny Weissmuller, American swimmer and actor
• January 21 - Jackie Wilson, singer
• February 9 - Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• February 15 - Ethel Merman, singer, actress
• February 22 - Jessamyn West, writer
• March 1 - Jackie Coogan, actor
• March 5 - Tito Gobbi, Italian baritone (b. 1915)
• March 5 - William Powell, actor
• March 16 - John Hoagland, war photographer
• March 21 - Sir Michael Redgrave, actor
• March 24 - Sam Jaffe, actor
• April 1 - Marvin Gaye, singer
• April 8 - Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1894)
• April 15 - Tommy Cooper, British comedian and magician
• April 20 - Hristo Prodanov, Bulgarian mountaineer
• April 22 - Ansel Adams, American photographer
• April 26 - Count Basie, musician, composer (b. 1904)
• May 16 - Andy Kaufman, comedian
• May 16 - Irwin Shaw, author
• May 19 - John Betjeman, English poet (b. 1906)
• May 28 - Eric Morecambe, British comedian
• June 26 - Michel Foucault, philosopher

July-December

• July 1 - Moshé Feldenkrais, founder of the Feldenkrais Method (b. 1904)
• July 8 - Brassaï, photographer (b. 1899)
• July 14 - Philippe Wynne, musician (b. 1941)
• July 26 - Ed Gein, serial killer (b. 1906)
• August 2 - Quirino Cristiani, Argentine animated film director (b. 1896)
• August 5 - Richard Burton, actor (b. 1925)
• August 11 - Alfred A. Knopf, American publisher (b. 1892)
• August 13 - Tigran Petrosian, chess player (b. 1929)
• August 14 - J. B. Priestley, English novelist and playwright (b. 1894)
• August 25 - Waite Hoyt, baseball player (b. 1899)
• September 25 - Walter Pidgeon, actor (b. 1897)
• October 5 - Leonard Rossiter, British actor (b. 1926)
• October 12 - Sir Anthony Berry, British politician (bombing) (b. 1925)
• October 14 - Martin Ryle, English radio astronomer, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics (b. 1918)
• October 20 - Paul Dirac, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902)
• October 21 - François Truffaut, French film director (b. 1932)
• October 31 - Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India (assassinated) (b. 1917)
• November 16 - Leonard Rose, cellist (leukemia) (b. 1918)
• December 8 - Luther Adler, American actor
• December 14 - Vicente Aleixandre, Spanish writer (b. 1898)
• December 15 - Jan Peerce, American tenor (b. 1904)
• December 20 - Gonzalo Márquez, Major League Baseball player (b. 1946)
• Konsta Jylhä, Finnish folk violinist (b. 1910)

Nobel Prizes

• Physics - Carlo Rubbia, Simon van der Meer
• Chemistry - Robert Bruce Merrifield
• Medicine - Niels Kaj Jerne, Georges JF Köhler, César Milstein
• Literature - Jaroslav Seifert
• Peace - Bishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu

Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

• Richard Stone

Templeton Prize

• Michael Bourdeaux

Right Livelihood Award

• Imane Khalifeh, SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) / Ela Bhatt, Winefreda Geonzon / FREE LAVA (Free Legal Assistance Volunteers' Association) and Wangari Maathai / Green Belt Movement

Fictional references

• The novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell in the 1940's, presents a dystopian view of how life might be in the year the protogonist believes to be 1984.