SortStack #289 — 2027-03-25

By year · Order from earliest to most recent.

1. The Black Death arrives in Europe aboard Genoese trading ships 1347

   Within five years it killed somewhere between a third and half of Europe's population — the deadliest pandemic in recorded human history.

2. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first to summit Everest 1953

   News of the climb reached London on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation — billed by the press as a double celebration.

3. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas 1963

   Abraham Zapruder's 26-second home movie of the motorcade became one of the most studied pieces of film ever shot.

4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google 1998

   The company started in Susan Wojcicki's garage, and its name is a misspelling of 'googol' — the number one followed by a hundred zeros.

5. The Bitcoin network launches with its first block 2009

   Satoshi Nakamoto embedded a newspaper headline about bank bailouts into the very first block — a permanent timestamp and a pointed message.

6. NASA's Curiosity rover lands on Mars 2012

   It was lowered to the surface on cables by a hovering rocket-powered 'sky crane' — a landing sequence engineers nicknamed the 'seven minutes of terror.'

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