June 24, 1989

A Big Mac cost $1.95 that summer of 1989, and the Dow Jones sat at 2,753 — just weeks after President Bush called for a Mars mission and a permanent Moon base, signaling that American ambitions in space were far from finished. On movie screens, "Lethal Weapon 2" was pulling in crowds as the summer's top box office draw, while on the radio, Simply Red's "If You Don't Know Me By Now" held the number one spot. That June, Japan launched the world's first high-definition television test broadcasts, a demonstration of analogue HDTV that pointed toward a fundamental change in how people would eventually watch the world around them.