Born on January 1, 1985

The first mobile phone call in British history was made by Michael Harrison, who telephoned his father Sir Ernest Harrison, the chairman of Vodafone, on New Year's Day 1985 from St Katharine Docks in London. The call was made on a Transportable Vodafone VT1, a device that weighed nearly five kilograms and cost over two thousand pounds. The symbolic call launched commercial mobile telephony in the United Kingdom, an industry that would grow from zero to over 90 million subscribers within three decades.

1985. The first British mobile phone call is made by Ernie Wise to Vodafone.

The Internet's Domain Name System went live on January 1, 1985. Before DNS, every computer on the network used a single shared file called HOSTS.TXT to look up addresses. As the network grew past a few hundred machines, that file became unmanageable. Paul Mockapetris designed DNS as the replacement: a distributed, hierarchical naming system that could scale to millions of nodes. Today it handles trillions of queries daily. Every website address you type gets translated through the system Mockapetris built in 1983. The internet's phone book, still working.

Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 crashes into Mount Illimani in Bolivia, killing all 29 aboard. That was 1985.

1985. Sigerson Clifford died. 72 years old. Irish poet, playwright, and civil servant.

Kamatari Fujiwara, died 1985 at 80. Japanese actor.