The 1990s produced some of the most memorable quiz questions of recent decades, and science and technology supply a large share of them. This guide covers five milestones, each documented by the institution responsible: NASA, CERN and the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. Dates matter in a decade round, so each section gives the date the institution itself records.
1990: the Hubble Space Telescope launches
NASA lists the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope as 24 April 1990, with the telescope placed in low Earth orbit. NASA says that since its launch Hubble has changed humanity’s fundamental understanding of the universe, from determining the atmospheric composition of planets around other stars to discovering dark energy. Its design, technology and serviceability have made it one of NASA’s most transformative observatories.
1989 to 1993: the World Wide Web takes shape
Quiz writers often disagree about when the Web began, so it helps to know the CERN timeline. CERN states that Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, and wrote the first proposal in March 1989. It was formalised with the Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau as a management proposal in November 1990. By the end of 1990 the first Web server and browser were running at CERN.
The 1990s then brought the key public steps, according to CERN:
- March 1991: the software became available to colleagues using CERN computers.
- August 1991: Berners-Lee announced the software on Internet newsgroups, and interest spread around the world.
- December 1991: the first Web server in the US came online at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
- 30 April 1993: CERN made the source code available on a royalty-free basis, making it free software.
- 1994: described by CERN as the “Year of the Web”, with the first International World Wide Web conference held at CERN in May.
CERN records that by the end of 1994 the Web had 10,000 servers, 2,000 of them commercial, and 10 million users.
1996: Dolly the sheep is born
The Roslin Institute states that Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was born on 5 July 1996 at the Institute. She was cloned from a cell taken from the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep and an egg cell from a Scottish Blackface sheep, and was born to a Scottish Blackface surrogate mother. Her white face was one of the first signs that she was a clone.
The Institute is careful about one detail that catches out quiz players: Dolly was not the first ever cloned mammal. That honour belongs to a sheep cloned from an embryo cell and born in 1984 in Cambridge, UK. What made Dolly special was that she had been made from an adult cell. She was announced to the world on 22 February 1997, timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing the experiments. After her death, Dolly’s body was donated to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where she is one of the museum’s most popular exhibits.
1997: Mars Pathfinder lands
NASA’s mission page says Mars Pathfinder launched on 4 December 1996 and landed on 4 July 1997 at Ares Vallis on Mars. It demonstrated a new way to land safely on the Red Planet and delivered the first-ever robotic rover, Sojourner, to the Martian surface. The mission ended on 27 September 1997. Pathfinder was designed originally as a technology demonstration, which makes it a neat example of a small mission with a lasting legacy.
1998: the first module of the International Space Station
NASA calls the Zarya module the first component launched for the International Space Station. It was launched on 20 November 1998 on a Proton-K vehicle. Zarya, which means “Sunrise” in English, was built by the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center in Moscow under a subcontract to Boeing for NASA. On 4 December 1998 the Unity module followed, and on 6 December the crew of space shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-88 captured Zarya with the shuttle’s robotic arm and mated it to Unity.
Using the milestones in a 1990s round
When a question asks for a date, look for the institution’s own record. The Web has several “birthdays” (the 1989 proposal, the 1991 release and the 1993 royalty-free decision), and Dolly has two dates (her birth in 1996 and her announcement in 1997). Knowing which event a question means is half the battle.
To test your knowledge of the decade, try one of the site’s tiers:
The bottom line
The 1990s put a telescope into orbit, opened the Web to the world, cloned a mammal from an adult cell, landed a rover on Mars and began building a space station. Each of those milestones has a precise date in its institution’s records, and those precise dates are what separate a good guess from a correct quiz answer.
Sources
- Hubble Space Telescope (science.nasa.gov)
- A short history of the Web (home.cern)
- Dolly (vet.ed.ac.uk)
- The Life of Dolly (vet.ed.ac.uk)
- Mars Pathfinder (science.nasa.gov)
- Zarya Module (nasa.gov)
- 25 Years Ago: NASA, Partners Begin Space Station Assembly (nasa.gov)
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