What happened onMarch 17, 1979Saturday Week 11

Today is September12, 2026 Saturday.

March 17 is a Saturday again in 1984.

About March 17

March 17 Events On this day through the years

Born ?

March 17FamousBirthdays

In loving memoryFamous DeathsMarch 17

The World in 1979 the year music went in your pocket

The first Walkman sold for 33,000 yen, about $150. At the US minimum wage of $2.90 an hour that was more than a week of full time work, for a player not much bigger than the cassette inside it.

Life back then

Gas lines came back that summer, but most of the year's noise came from elsewhere. In July Sony put the first Walkman in Japanese shops, and wearing headphones in public stopped looking odd. Eleven days later a Chicago baseball crowd blew up a crate of disco records between games and swarmed the field, and radio began dropping the genre. In September, cable homes found a channel that showed sports and nothing else.

The year in 8 events

• ✈️Feb 1 Ayatollah Khomeini flies back to Iran after 14 years away. Huge crowds meet him in Tehran.
• 🪐Mar 5 NASA's Voyager 1 makes its closest pass by Jupiter. Its pictures soon reveal volcanoes erupting on the moon Io.
• ☢️Mar 28 A reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partly melts down. Nobody is hurt, but plans for new nuclear plants stall.
• 🏛️May 4 Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to serve as British prime minister.
• ⛪Jun 2 Pope John Paul II lands in Warsaw, the first papal visit to a communist country. Millions of Poles turn out to see him.
• ✊Jul 19 Sandinista rebels enter Managua. Nicaragua's ruler Anastasio Somoza has already fled the country.
• 🚩Nov 4 Students seize the US embassy in Tehran and take 66 Americans hostage.
• ⚔️Dec 27 Soviet troops seize Kabul and put in a new leader. Their war in Afghanistan lasts nine years.

Who Was in Charge?

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