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The Top Five Events of 1996 - and why they remain important today

the Unabomber  |  747 crash  |  Olympic Park bombing  |  Hotmail  |  Dolly the Sheep

  FBI arrests suspected Unabomber

Ted Kaczynski, familiar to most as the Unabomber, was spared his life by means of a plea bargain and given four life sentences plus 30 years in prison. Kaczynski eluded the F.B.I. for 17 years, during which time he orchestrated 16 explosions that killed three people and injured 23 others.  Kaczynski remains fascinating on many levels:  he was well-educated and successful for a time yet he was very suspicious of technology and was labeled a Luddite; when a sketch by a witness was provided to authorities, the attacks stopped for six years - yet most people agree Kaczynski was insane; authorities were so confused by the motives behind the bombings that they theorized Kaczynski at various times hated the wood industry or computers or left-wing universities; Kaczynski made his own screws by hand for his bombs - with wood!

Spring 1962:
Kaczynski graduates from Harvard University, then goes on to master's and doctorate in math from the University of Michigan.

Fall 1967:
Kaczynski gets a coveted math teaching post at the University of California-Berkeley but quits without explanation in 1969.

Click here for a series of articles on the Unabomber.

Ted before ...  During ...    After

February 1996:
David Kaczynski, after reading the manifesto published in the New York Times and the Washington Post by the Unabomber and comparing it to letters written by his brother Ted, communicates his suspicions to the FBI that his brother is, indeed, the Unabomber.
                                                 
April 3, 1996:
Theodore Kaczynski is arrested at his mountain cabin in Montana. He is indicted in Sacramento for two murders and attacks on two people, and in New Jersey for yet another murder.

On an interesting side note...

Unabomber is a word coined to represent the crimes of Ted Kaczynski, namely... he targeted universities and airlines with his bombs.

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  747 airliner crashes in Atlantic off Long Island, NY;
all 230 aboard perish

With the crash of TWA Flight 800 off New York in 1996 came a host of
unanswered questions, chiefly concerned with why the airliner blew up.
  Despite government efforts to laboriously reconstruct the plane
and examine the wreckage, persistent rumors of eyewitness
 accounts of a missile bringing the plane down made Americans question the
 government's role in the investigation and brought home, for the first time for many, that the threat of domestic terrorism now figured as a dark understructure of American life. 
Read the complete news story about Flight 800 here.

On an interesting side note..

1996 was the worst year for airline disasters world-wide:

• Jan. 8, Kinshasa, Zaire: Russian-built Antonov-32 cargo plane crashed after takeoff from Kinshasa into the center of the city, killing over 350 people and injuring at least 470.

• Feb. 6, off coast of Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic: Dominican Alas Nacionales Boeing 737 crashed into Atlantic Ocean after takeoff, killing 189.

• Feb. 29, near Arequipa, Peru: Faucett Airline Boeing 737 crashed into mountain as it prepared to land. All 117 passengers and crew were killed.

• May 11, Everglades, Fla.: ValuJet DC-9 went down in swamp, killing 110. Cargo fire caused by oxygen generators missing safety caps.

• July 17, off coast of Long Island, N.Y.: TWA Boeing 747-100 bound for Paris from N.Y. exploded over waters of eastern L.I. and crashed into Atlantic Ocean, killing all 230 aboard.

• Nov. 12, nr. New Delhi, India: shortly after takeoff, Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 collided in midair with Kazak Airlines Ilyushin 76 plane approaching the New Delhi airport. All 349 passengers and crew were killed; the world's worst midair collision.

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  The Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia during the 1996 Summer Olympics

More domestic terrorisms concerns occurred in 1996 during the 100th Summer Olympics held in Atlanta Georgia.  This incident is important for a number of reason, chiefly because it highlights the all-pervasive fear that seemed to underlie so many incidences in 1996 - that of random violence for violence's sake.  Also, people in positions of authority seemed to make consistently bad calls, which highlighted the Waco troubles and the Oklahoma City bombings and made people question the effectiveness of the police and the FBI.  Following is a brief synopsis of the Centennial Park bombing, but for the complete interactive story from CNN you may go here...

An early morning blast in the crowded Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta killed Alice Hawthorne from bomb shrapnel that struck her in the head. The blast wounded 111 others. Despite the tragedy, officials and athletes agreed that the "Olympic spirit" should prevail and that the games should continue as planned, which they did.

Just hours after the attack, a Centennial Park security guard named Richard Jewell was hailed as a hero for discovering the suspicious green knapsack that contained the bomb and helping police clear the area before the explosion. Around the time that Jewell called the Federal Bureau of Investigation, police received a call stating that a bomb had been left in the park and police suspected Jewell of planting the bomb to draw attention to himself.

So, four days after the bombing, news organizations began reporting that Jewell had been named as a suspect in the bombing. Jewell was cleared of suspicion by the United States Department of Justice in October of 1996 but the negative attention ruined his life and his career.  He sued everybody, and won.

On an interesting side note...

The real Centennial Olympic Park bomber is a man called Eric Robert Rudolph, who was also a suspect in several bombing of abortion clinics and nightclubs.  Rudolph hid in the Appalachian Mountains for over five years before he was captured on May 31, 2003 while going through a dumpster in North Carolina.  The FBI suspected that several town people, who were sympathetic to Rudolph's right wing agenda, helped him for years with food and clothing.

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  From Microsoft: Hotmail.com, a Web-based email site

From Microsoft archived records of 1999:  The current sign-up rate for new memberships
frequently totals more than 1 million per week,
and 150,000 new users per day.
No email service in history has reached such a large size or added members so rapidly.

The success of Hotmail speaks volumes about how email has become a critical communications tool in people's lives, one that allows them to stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues from any Internet-enabled PC in the world, anytime and, in the case of Hotmail, entirely for free. In fact, more than 80 percent of Internet users regularly use email, making it the most popular online activity around the globe, according to a recent worldwide Internet study conducted by IntelliQuest Information Group, Inc. And the growth of the email market shows no signs of slowing.

Perhaps the most important thing about free web-based email is that it allows anyone, from any location, to be in touch and is a great equalizer with no regard to economic status.

On an interesting side note...

In calendar year 1978, Microsoft sales were $1,355,665.

Redmond, Washington - January 18, 1996 - 1:30 PDT - Microsoft Corporation today announced second-quarter revenues of $2.2 billion, a 48% increase over the same quarter a year ago...
read the complete story here

To the left is a picture
of the employees
of Microsoft in 1978
(that is Bill Gates in the lower left corner).

The question is -

would you have invested
200 dollars
in Microsoft stock
in 1978?

 

 

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  Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell, is born

Dolly was born July 5, 1996 in a research compound of the Roslin Institute in Scotland, and she created an international sensation when the achievement was announced on Feb. 23, 1997.  Cloning remains a controversy to this day, especially human cloning, because of the many unanswered questions associated with cloning.  People fear it will encourage making a race of warriors or supermodels, or that people will be grown and harvested just for spare parts. However, cloning offers the best hope to people for organ donations and superior food crops that are resistant to disease. 
For the complete news story of Dolly, click here.

In April 2002, President George W Bush called for a ban on human cloning. 
Read his speech to the Senate here.

On an interesting side note...

Dolly the Sheep was named after Dolly Parton,
the country/western singer, because the cell used to clone Dolly was a mammary cell. 

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