Steve Wozniak's refinements to the Apple II's color graphics and floating-point BASIC push the fledgling machine toward the design that would launch personal computing to the mass market.

Apple Computer completes its first batch of fifty Apple I computers, delivering them to the Byte Shop in Mountain View for retail sale.

Seymour Cray's Cray-1, the first commercially successful supercomputer, was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory, redefining scientific computation.

Shugart Associates introduced the 5.25-inch floppy disk, a cheaper, smaller alternative to 8-inch disks that would dominate personal computing for a decade.

Lebanon's civil war intensified as Syrian-backed forces clashed with Christian militias around Beirut, deepening the conflict that would last 15 years.

Economist Milton Friedman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on monetary history, theory, and policy.