- Mount St Helen's erupted
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back came out
- Ordinary People won the Best Picture Oscar
- The Covenant by Michner was the #1 Best Seller
- The president of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella, is assassinated by the Mafia
- Robert Mugabe is elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe
- The Silver Thursday market crash occurs
- The Dominican embassy siege ends with all hostages released and the guerrillas flying to Cuba
- Pac-Man, the best-selling arcade game of all time, is released
- U.S. President Jimmy Carter signs Proclamation 4771, requiring 18- to 25-year-old males to register for a peacetime military draft, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
- Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel and Xerox introduce the DIX standard for Ethernet, which is the first implementation outside of Xerox, and the first to support 10 Mbit per second speeds
- The Nobel prize for Literature that year went to Czeslaw Milosz. The Nobel Peace prize went to Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. The Nobel prize for physics went to James Watson Cronin and Val Logsdon Fitch from the United States for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons.
- The Iran Hostage Crisis / US breaks diplomatic ties with Iran
- John Lennon was shot
- Smallpox is eradicated
- The world population was 4.453 billion
- CNN launches
- Ronald Reagan became President
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer
- Voyager I reaches Saturn
- Alfred Hitchcock died
- Jean-Paul Sartre died
- Mae West died
- Hewlett-Packard announces release of its first personal computer
- Christina Ricci, Chelsea Clinton, Venus Williams, Jessica Simpson, Macaulay Culkin, and Jake Gyllenhaal are born
- Philadelphia Phllies win the World Series
- Pittsburgh Steelers win Superbowl XIV
- "Who Shot J.R.?" cliff hanger on the soap opera series, Dallas
- Rock with You by Michael Jackson topped the US charts
- Magnum PI premiers
- CDs and Flash Memory were invented
- These were the shows playing that year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_in_American_television
mar 1 2011 ∞
mar 1 2011 +
mar 1 2011 +