Five Southeast Asian nations signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Bali, establishing a framework for regional peace and non-interference that still guides ASEAN diplomacy.

Fairchild's Channel F, whose chip architecture was overseen by engineer Jerry Lawson, pioneered the interchangeable video game cartridge, though its exact March release date is less firmly documented and often cited around this period.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company in Los Altos, California, to sell Wozniak's hand-built Apple I circuit board.

In the tense weeks following the Tiananmen Incident, Hua Guofeng's position as Mao's chosen successor solidifies amid crackdowns on pro-Zhou Enlai demonstrators.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, joined by Ronald Wayne, formally establish Apple Computer Company in a Cupertino garage to sell the Apple I circuit board.

Weeks after Argentina's military coup, junta-directed forces intensified operations of forced disappearance in Buenos Aires, a defining early phase of the Dirty War.

Days after police killed hundreds of student protesters in Soweto, unrest spreads across South African townships, hardening global opposition to apartheid.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak delivered the first batch of fifty Apple I computers to the Byte Shop in Mountain View, launching Apple as a commercial enterprise.

The United States launched a mass swine flu vaccination campaign after a soldier's death at Fort Dix, eventually inoculating over 40 million Americans.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam was formally proclaimed, unifying North and South Vietnam under communist rule a year after Saigon's fall.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the industrial city of Tangshan, China, before dawn, killing an estimated 240,000 to 655,000 people in one of history's deadliest quakes.

NASA's Viking 1 orbiter snapped a grainy image of a Martian mesa that, through shadow and pixelation, resembled a giant humanoid face.

The Games of the XXI Olympiad opened in Montreal, a spectacle whose massive cost overruns would burden the city with debt for three decades.

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.