By Mark Aumann, NASCAR.COM
February 4, 2005
01:42 PM EST (18:42 GMT)
A piece of debris punctured Dale Earnhardt's tire on the final lap of the 32nd Daytona 500 on Feb. 18, 1990, sending Earnhardt's No. 3 Chevrolet fish-tailing up the banking and handing an improbable victory to Derrike Cope. Earnhardt led 155 laps and had a lead of 39 seconds at one point. However, a spin by Geoff Bodine with eight laps to go bunched the field for a five-lap dash to the checkered flag.  |  | NASCAR ACCELERATION | |
| ALSO IN 1990 ... |
| • | Douglas Wilder becomes the first elected black governor as he takes office in Richmond, Va. (Jan. 13) |
| • | Dr. Antonia Novello is sworn in as Surgeon General, becoming the first female and Hispanic to serve in that position (March 9) |
| • | The largest art theft in U.S. history: 12 paintings, collectively worth $100 million, are stolen by two thieves posing as police officers from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (March 18) |
| • | Music legend Stevie Ray Vaughan killed in a helicopter crash along with four others near Elkhorn, Wis. (Aug. 27) |
| • | Russian Garry Kasparov holds his title by winning the World Chess Championship match against countryman Anatoly Karpov (Dec. 31) |
Courtesy: Wikipedia
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On May 22, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. The full version was priced at $149.95 and the upgrade version was priced at $79.95. With his check for $188,150, Cope could have purchased 1,254 copies of Windows 3.0, not including sales tax. If Cope had driven from his hometown of Spanaway, Wash., to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to pick up his copies of Windows 3.0 from Bill Gates, the 55-mile trip would have taken about an hour on Interstate 5, not counting Seattle traffic -- or 19 minutes and 55 seconds at Cope's race-winning pace of 165.761 mph. By 1990, Starbucks had been selling coffee from its Pike Place Market location for 19 years. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol in 1990. That is the language computers use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet. He also designed a scheme to give documents addresses on the Internet, now known as a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. By the end of the year he had also written a program to retrieve and view hypertext documents. He called this client "WorldWideWeb." On Feb. 12, Super Mario Bros. 3 was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System console and promptly sold more than 6 million copies worldwide. On Jan. 7, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was closed to the public for the first time in 800 years because of safety concerns. Computer models suggested the tower should have toppled once it reached a tilt of 5.44 degrees, but by 1990, it was leaning by 5.5 degrees. It was reopened in 2001, but engineers claim it will once again be in danger of falling over within the next 300 years. On Jan. 3, former Panamanian president Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces. On Jan. 18, Washington, D.C. mayor Barion Berry surrended to FBI agents and was arrested on drug possession charges. On Feb. 11, Mike Tyson surrendered his world heavyweight boxing crown to Buster Douglas. The collapse of the Soviet Union was big news in 1990, especially after the first McDonald's was opened in Moscow on Jan. 31. On Feb. 7, the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party agreed to give up its monopoly of power. On March 15, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as the first executive president of the Soviet Union. On June 1, President Bush and Gorbachev signed a treaty to end chemical weapon production and start destroying each of their nation's stockpiles. By November, Gorbachev had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But while one threat diminished, another was looming. On Aug. 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting in motion what would become the Gulf War. Four days later, the United Nations Security Council ordered a global trade embargo against Iraq. On Sept. 11, President Bush delivered a nationally televised speech in which he threatened the use of force to remove Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait. Two months later, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 678, authorizing military intervention in Iraq if that nation did not withdraw its forces from Kuwait and free all foreign hostages by Jan. 15, 1991. The Hubble Space Telescope was placed into orbit April 24 and became operational May 20. The telescope was repaired for the first time in 1993 to fix the focus of its primary mirror, then serviced again in '97 and '99. However, with the shuttles grounded because of the 2003 Columbia disaster, its future is as hazy as the first pictures it took in 1990. → Click here for more Daytona Countdown. | 
