Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

The 1995 relaunch of Chibi Maruko-chan, Momoko Sakura's slice-of-life comedy about a scatterbrained third-grader navigating school, family and small everyday embarrassments in a quiet Japanese town. Produced by Nippon Animation, this version replaced the original 1990-1992 series and has stayed in weekly production ever since, making it one of the longest continuously running anime on air.

Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart releases in Japanese theaters, a coming-of-age story following bookish schoolgirl Shizuku as she chases a mysterious cat and discovers her own ambitions as a writer.

Amazon.com went live from a rented house in Bellevue, Washington, selling books out of a garage-scale operation with a catalogue it did not stock. Within a month it had shipped to all fifty states and forty-five countries.

Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelion begins airing, a mecha series following teenage pilot Shinji Ikari as NERV's Evangelion units battle mysterious beings called Angels threatening Tokyo-3.

APPP's Golden Boy premieres on home video, a comedic OVA following Kintarou Oe, a law-school graduate who bikes from town to town taking odd jobs and chasing life lessons (and misadventures with women) instead of a career.

Production I.G's Ghost in the Shell opens in Japanese theaters, Mamoru Oshii's cyberpunk thriller adapting Masamune Shirow's manga, following cybernetic Section 9 agent Major Motoko Kusanagi as she hunts a mysterious hacker known as the Puppet Master.

TMS Entertainment's Detective Conan begins its television broadcast, adapting Gosho Aoyama's manga about a teenage detective shrunk into a child's body who solves cases under a false identity while investigating the organization responsible.

Sunrise begins releasing Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, a One Year War-era OVA following Ensign Shiro Amada as he leads a Ground Type Gundam unit while falling for an enemy Zeon pilot.

Oshkosh Truck Corporation bought fire apparatus builder Pierce Manufacturing outright, a deal that kicked off Oshkosh's diversification and set up Pierce to become the world's largest fire truck maker.

The Roslin Institute reveals that a Finn-Dorset lamb born the previous July was cloned from an adult mammary-gland cell by somatic cell nuclear transfer - the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell.

Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke opens in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki's epic about a cursed prince caught between the spirits of an ancient forest and the humans of Iron Town.

Gainax's The End of Evangelion opens in Japan, a theatrical film providing an alternate, more conclusive ending to the TV series as NERV comes under full assault from SEELE while Shinji, Asuka, and the rest confront the Human Instrumentality Project.

The 1997 TV adaptation of Kentaro Miura's dark fantasy manga Berserk begins airing, following mercenary swordsman Guts on a revenge-driven hunt for the corrupt king of Midland and the demonic Band of the Falcon that betrayed him.

Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in October 1997, reviving a struggling industrial city and popularizing the aircraft-design software that made its curved form buildable.

MV Solitaire, converted from a 1972 bulk carrier into a 300-metre pipelaying ship, entered service for Allseas in 1998 and became the world's largest and most powerful pipelay vessel.

Water begins flowing from the newly completed Katse Dam through the Lesotho Highlands Water Project to Johannesburg, the first payment on a 1986 treaty that turns Lesotho’s rainfall into its biggest export.

Artland releases the first episode of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes Gaiden OVA, a collection of side stories set before the main series that trace Reinhard von Lohengramm's rise through the Galactic Empire's command.

Perfect Blue releases in Japanese theaters, Satoshi Kon's directorial debut for Madhouse, a psychological thriller about a retiring pop idol whose grip on reality frays as a stalker and an impersonator blur the line between her old and new selves.

Andoni Luis Aduriz opened his Basque restaurant in Gipuzkoa in March 1998. Restaurant Magazine has counted it among the world's best since 2006, ranking it as high as fourth.

Sunrise's Cowboy Bebop begins airing, a genre-blending space-western following bounty hunters Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, and their crew aboard the ship Bebop.

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page present Google, a search-engine prototype that ranks pages by the link structure of the web rather than by page text alone. The paper describes PageRank and a prototype indexing 24 million pages.

Triangle Staff's Serial Experiments Lain begins airing, a psychological sci-fi series following withdrawn teenager Lain Iwakura as she is drawn into the Wired, a networked reality blurring into the physical world.

Brain's Base begins releasing Getter Robo: Armageddon, a dark direct-sequel OVA in which Ryoma Nagare and his allies must pilot Getter Robo again after a resurrected Dr. Saotome unleashes a catastrophe that nearly wipes out humanity.

Caterpillar unveiled its 797 — at the time the world's largest and most powerful haul truck — at its Decatur, Illinois assembly plant on 29 September 1998.

Rurouni Kenshin OVA: Trust & Betrayal (Tsuioku-hen) premieres, director Kazuhiro Furuhashi's darker, more graphic prequel OVA telling the origin of Himura Kenshin as the assassin Hitokiri Battousai.