The week-long syndication window opens for the fifth episode of The Next Step Beyond, a revival of the 1950s/60s supernatural anthology series One Step Beyond, hosted and directed by John Newland. Meredith MacRae (Petticoat Junction) guest stars.
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The 95th episode of The Six Million Dollar Man is broadcast on ABC, starring Lee Majors and Richard Anderson. Jared Martin (The Fantastic Journey, War Of The Worlds) guest stars in a special two-hour episode.
BBC1 premieres the 
The 28th episode of Wonder Woman airs on CBS, starring Lynda Carter and Lyle Waggoner. Ed Begley, Jr. guest stars.
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BBC1 premieres the
Just before Valentine’s Day, RCA kills its Studio II home video game console, whose blocky black & white graphics and library of “edutainment” cartridges have proven to be no competition for the more game-oriented, full-color consoles from Fairchild and Atari over the previous two Christmas shopping seasons. 120 employees directly involved with developing for or assembling the Studio II and related products are laid off from RCA’s facility in Swannanoa, North Carolina as a result. The company makes no further attempts to break into the video game business.
The 52nd episode of The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner and Richard Anderson, airs on NBC. Helen Hunt (Mad About You, Twister) guest stars.
BBC1 premieres the
Programmers Ward Christensen and Randy Suess put their brainchild, the CBBS or Computer Bulletin Board System, online for the first time. Accessible to anyone with a computer modem and a phone line, CBBS allows users to log in one at a time since the system is limited to a single phone line; messages both public and private can be posted. Christensen and Suess become the first SysOps, or System Operators, responsible for both technical maintenance and moderation of the system’s content. Similar bulletin board systems spring up across America and elsewhere (indeed, in the late 1980s, theLogBook itself will be launched as a series of text files on such a BBS).
The first episode of Harold Jack Bloom’s sci-fi series Project UFO premieres on NBC, portraying fictionalized investigations into what the show claims are actual cases from the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book investigations. William Jordan (Beyond Westworld) and Caskey Swaim star; the series is produced by Jack Webb (Dragnet). Anne Schedeen (ALF) guest stars.
BBC1 premieres the
The U.S. Air Force launches NAVSTAR-1, the first of a planned constellation of experimental satellites supporting the Department of Defense’s Global Positioning System project. Envisioned as a network of satellites providing extremely accurate location data for military purposes, the Global Positioning System will later grow to service civilian customers as well. Three other NAVSTAR satellites are launched in 1978 alone, and later satellites in the original NAVSTAR series will be launched betwen 1980 and 1985. Unlike the later, more advanced NAVSTAR II satellites of the 1990s, data from the original NAVSTAR constellation is restricted to the American military.
NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe, en route to its first destination, develops a potentially mission-jeopardizing problem: the scan platform, which contains and aims many of Voyager’s scientific instruments, jams and becomes stuck in place. As Voyager 1 has yet to even reach Jupiter, this threatens to make it an expensive failure. Transmitting commands from Earth to give the scan platform a gentle three-axis workout, engineers at NASA manage to free the stuck instruments, salvaging Voyager 1’s mission to the outer planets and their moons. (A similar fault develops in Voyager 2 during its 1981 encounter with Saturn.)
Science fiction writer Leigh Brackett, who is battling cancer, turns in her first and only draft of a screenplay simply titled “Star Wars Sequel” (later to be known as
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