April 11, 1976

Gas cost $0.59 a gallon in the spring of 1976, and the Dow Jones stood at 1,005 — the America's bicentennial year was approaching, with debate in Washington focused on defense budgets and foreign policy as the country prepared to mark 200 years of independence. At the movies, "All in the Family" continued to dominate television ratings while Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman drew audiences to "All the President's Men," a dramatization of the Watergate reporting that had brought down a presidency just two years earlier. The Boston Celtics defeated the Phoenix Suns to claim the NBA championship, and that same spring the Cray-1, the world's first commercially developed supercomputer, was delivered to a federal laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, marking a milestone in the history of computing.