1990
Mandela walks free
After twenty-seven years in prison, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison near Cape Town holding the hand of his wife Winnie, his fist raised. A world that had last seen him as a black-haired lawyer now saw a tall gray seventy-one-year-old. Apartheid was not yet dead, but it was finally dying.
German reunification
At midnight the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist and its sixteen million citizens became part of the Federal Republic. Flags went up over the Reichstag; crowds sang the national anthem. Forty-five years after Hitler's Reich had been divided among the victors, Germany was one country again. The Cold War was officially over.
Hubble Space Telescope launched
The shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, where astronomers expected to finally see the universe without atmospheric blur. To their horror the mirror was ground slightly wrong and pictures were fuzzy. Three years later astronauts flew up and fixed it. The deepest images of the universe ever made began to arrive.
Iraq invades Kuwait
Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard crossed the border before dawn and took the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in hours, sending its ruling family fleeing by helicopter. Saddam declared Kuwait the nineteenth province of Iraq. Within days an American-led coalition of thirty-five nations was forming in Saudi Arabia, and the post-Cold-War world had its first major test.
Hubble Space Telescope deployed
The space shuttle Discovery released Hubble into orbit above the atmosphere. Its first images came back blurry; the main mirror had been ground with a tiny error. Astronauts visited in 1993 and installed corrective optics. From then on, Hubble produced pictures of such depth that they changed how humans pictured the universe.
Lithuania declares independence
The first Soviet republic to break away, Lithuania declared its independence from the USSR, pulling the thread that unraveled the entire union. Gorbachev imposed an economic blockade; Soviet troops killed fourteen protesters in Vilnius in January 1991. By late 1991 the unravel was complete. The Baltic states had led the way out.
Hubble and first web server
In the same season NASA deployed the Hubble Space Telescope and Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web server at CERN on a NeXT computer bearing a handwritten sticker: This machine is a server. Do not power it down! Two technologies that would define knowledge in the coming century had gone live within weeks of each other.