Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

Sam Walton opened Wal-Mart Discount City on Rogers' Highway 71, his first store under the name after a decade running Ben Franklin variety stores. The format was the bet: lower margins on everything, in towns the big chains had written off as too small.

On October 1, 1964, just nine days before the Tokyo Olympics opened, Japan's Tokaido Shinkansen began carrying passengers between Tokyo and Osaka at over 200 km/h.

The Houston Astrodome, the world's first fixed-roof, air-conditioned multipurpose stadium, opened on 9 April 1965 with an exhibition game between the Astros and Yankees — though it's stood closed and searching for a new use since 2008.

Gordon Moore's four-page article in Electronics observes that the number of components per chip has been doubling yearly and projects it forward a decade. The observation becomes Moore's law and the semiconductor industry's roadmap.

Mercedes-Benz's Wörth am Rhein plant, which had assembled only truck cabs since opening in 1963, produced its first complete vehicle, a green LP 608, on 14 July 1965. The plant has since grown into the world's largest truck factory, building models including the Actros.

London's cylindrical BT Tower (originally the GPO Tower) began carrying live microwave telecommunications traffic in 1965, its concrete core partly designed to survive a nuclear blast.

Opel opened its Dudenhofen proving ground near Frankfurt in April 1966, the most modern car test center in Europe at the time. Six decades on, its more than 70 kilometers of track still put prototype technologies like automated driving through secretive testing before they reach the road.

BMW's newly built assembly line at its Berlin-Spandau plant produces its first complete motorcycle, an R 60/2 with a swinging-fork chassis, kicking off the relocation of BMW motorcycle manufacturing from Munich to Berlin.

The US Army shut down Camp Century, its secret nuclear-powered base carved into the Greenland ice sheet to conceal a mobile missile network under Project Iceworm, after the tunnels it depended on began collapsing.

Moshe Safdie's modular housing experiment, conceived as his student thesis, opened to the public as a pavilion of Montreal's 1967 World's Fair.

The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1968 American heist film directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan R. Starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, and Jack Weston, the film follows Vicki Anderson (Dunaway), who is hired to investigate the culprits of a multi-million dollar bank heist orchestrated by Thomas Crown (McQueen).

The first Jumbo Jet flew from Paine Field with test pilots Jack Waddell and Brien Wygle at the controls. Despite a minor flap problem the flight confirmed the 747 handled well and was largely immune to the Dutch roll that had plagued early swept-wing jets.

The Anglo-French supersonic airliner, built by Sud Aviation and the British Aircraft Corporation under a 1962 treaty, flew for the first time from Toulouse. Four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 turbojets drove an ogival delta wing carrying 92 to 128 passengers.

A magnitude 7.9 earthquake off the Peruvian coast shook loose part of Mount Huascaran, and the debris avalanche buried the town of Yungay. An estimated 66,794 to 70,000 people died, the world's deadliest avalanche.

Ted Codd's paper in Communications of the ACM proposes storing data as relations queried by predicate logic, independent of how it is laid out on disk. It is the founding document of the relational database and of SQL.

The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded drove a storm surge over the low-lying islands of the Ganges Delta. At least 300,000 died, and the Pakistani government's response helped set off the Bangladesh Liberation War.

The Magic Kingdom and its Florida resort opened to the public near Orlando, realizing Walt Disney's vision for a second, larger theme park.

Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971 with the film producer Paul Aratow, in a house on Shattuck Avenue, and in doing so more or less founded what came to be called California cuisine: a short menu set by what the farms around the bay had that week rather than by a fixed carte. The block it stands on is now known as the Gourmet Ghetto.

Richard Nixon spent 21 to 28 February 1972 in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai, meeting Mao Zedong on the day he arrived. No sitting US president had set foot in the People's Republic, and the two governments had had no diplomatic relations for 23 years.

At the end of Nixon's visit the two governments published a joint statement setting out, separately, what each believed about Taiwan. Washington said it 'acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China' — the sentence US policy has rested on ever since.

Tumut 3 became Australia's first major pumped-storage hydroelectric plant, eventually reaching 1,800 MW of generating capacity as part of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Three of its six units, fed by Talbingo Dam, can also pump water back uphill overnight at a combined 600 MW using cheap off-peak power.

Airbus’ first aircraft and the world’s first twin-engine wide-body airliner flew from Toulouse–Blagnac a month ahead of schedule, for one hour and 25 minutes, with Max Fischl as captain and Bernard Ziegler as first officer.

San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid welcomed its first tenant after overcoming years of public opposition to its unconventional tapered design.

Fischer Black and Myron Scholes give a closed-form price for a European option in the Journal of Political Economy, in the same year the Chicago Board Options Exchange opens. The formula becomes the language of the derivatives market.

Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the Sydney Opera House, capping fourteen years of construction that ran a decade late and far over its original budget.