Videocassette recorders (VCRs) are catching on throughout the United States. By midyear, 7 million homes have a VCR, which are selling at a rate of 250,000 per month. VHS (video home system) format dominates over Sony’s Beta format. Movie rental stores begin to attract an increasingly large volume of business.

Also that year:

• The birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. is declared a national holiday, to be observed on the third Monday of January.

• A South Korean civilian jetliner en route from New York to Seoul strays off course over Soviet territory and is shot down by a Soviet fighter plane. All 269 crew and passengers die, straining U.S.-Soviet relations. President Reagan calls it a “horrifying act of violence.”

• The Nobel Prize for literature is awarded to Britain’s William Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies.

• Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space as a crew member on the second mission of the space shuttle Challenger.

• The Pacific Ocean warming current known as “El Niño” upsets weather patterns worldwide, causing heavy rains in costal Peru, drought in northern Australia and other weather anomalies in North America and Europe.

• Apple Computer unveils a new device called a “mouse” that allows users to point an arrow in order to access computer functions rather than input complicated instructions on a keyboard.