1983
year
1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1983rd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 983rd year of the 2nd millennium, the 83rd year of the 20th century, and the 4th year of the 1980s decade.
1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call.
Events
January
January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP is officially completed (this is considered to be the beginning of the true Internet).
January 6 – Pope John Paul II appoints a bishop over the Czechoslovak exile community, which the Rudé právo newspaper calls a "provocation." This begins a year-long disagreement between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Vatican, leading to the eventual restoration of diplomatic relations between the two states.
January 14 – The head of Bangladesh's military dictatorship, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, announces his intentions to "turn Bangladesh into an Islamic state."
January 18 – U.S. Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt makes controversial remarks blaming poor living conditions on Native American reservations on "the failures of socialism." Watt will eventually resign in September after a series of other controversial remarks.
January 23 – The European Economic Community's Common Fisheries Policy comes into effect.
January 24 – 25 members of the Red Brigades are sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1978 murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro.
January 25 – IRAS is launched from Vandenberg AFB, to conduct the world's first all-sky infrared survey from space.
January 26 – 1983 Code of Canon Law: Pope John Paul II revises Roman Catholic canon law, the first such revision since 1917. Among the changes is a reduction in the number of offenses qualifying for automatic excommunication, from 37 to only seven.
The public source identifies “1983” as year. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around year.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2434. The Library of Congress control number is sh91005042. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1978 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “1983” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.