Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

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.

The Exorcist is a 1973 American supernatural horror film directed by William Friedkin and produced by William Peter Blatty, who adapted his own 1971 novel. The film stars Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, and Linda Blair, and follows the demonic possession of a young girl and the attempt to rescue her through an exorcism by two Catholic priests.

Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience completed its hangar-sized Large-Scale Rainfall Simulator in Tsukuba, letting scientists recreate extreme storms on demand to study landslides and flooding.

Gilbert Lau opened Flower Drum on 26 May 1975 in Melbourne's Chinatown and spent the following decades making the case that Cantonese cooking belonged at the top of Australian fine dining rather than in a separate category of it. It has been a fixture of the city's restaurant lists ever since, on Market Lane.

The Mack family opened Europa-Park, a 16-hectare amusement park built around European-themed lands, in the German town of Rust. It has since grown into continental Europe's second-most-visited theme park.

Georges Köhler and César Milstein report in Nature that fusing an antibody-producing cell with a myeloma cell yields a line that secretes a single antibody indefinitely. Monoclonal antibodies become the basis of the modern biologics industry.

Two years after the Arab oil embargo, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act set up a federal emergency oil stockpile and gave the President the power to order it sold when supply is severely interrupted. Ford called the bill imperfect but signed it anyway, to end "the long debate over national energy policy".

A magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck directly beneath Tangshan at 3:42 a.m. local time, and within minutes 85% of the city's buildings were down. The official toll was 242,469 dead; historians accept at least 300,000.

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman propose public-key cryptography and a way for two parties to agree a secret key over an open channel. It is the idea that later makes e-commerce and secure messaging possible.

Exorcist II: The Heretic is a 1977 American supernatural science fiction horror film directed by John Boorman and written by William Goodhart. It is the second installment in The Exorcist film series and the sequel to The Exorcist (1973), and stars Linda Blair, Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, Max von Sydow, Kitty Winn, Paul Henreid, and James Earl Jones.

A VEB Wohnungsbaukombinat Berlin construction brigade set the first concrete panel of a WBS 70 apartment block at Marchwitzastraße on 8 July 1977, starting what became Europe's largest prefabricated housing estate with 103,000 flats built in 15 years.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve took its first delivery on 21 July 1977: about 412,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian light crude, pumped into salt caverns near Lake Charles, Louisiana. Construction had started that April, when the government bought up existing caverns along the Gulf Coast rather than wait to dig its own.

Sally Schmitt opened the restaurant in a stone building in Napa Valley in 1978 and built her menus around local, seasonal produce. Thomas Keller bought it in 1994 and it now holds three Michelin stars.

From 1 January 1979 Washington recognised the People's Republic as the sole legal government of China and withdrew recognition from Taipei, ending thirty years in which the United States had treated the Republic of China on Taiwan as the government of all China.

Four weeks after relations began, Deng Xiaoping stood on the South Lawn for a full arrival ceremony — the first visit to Washington by a leader of Communist China. He went on to charm Congress and the press, and to be photographed in a ten-gallon hat at a Texas rodeo.