Colin Haynes talking about confusing version numbers in the world of computer hardwares and softwares sparked a brainteaser to which these are the answers. As I explained at the time, if you use a search engine, which I never said was against the rules, it turns out to be significantly harder to play, not easier as one might expect.
People without search engines were allowed the leeway of (say) concluding that 1984 on the list was actually the year. But those with search engines were required to give comprehensive answers, where 1984 was not only more than a year (and, amusingly, thus difficult to search for) but it was also multiple years.
The earliest year numbered 1984 in a major calendar is Anno Mundi 1984 in the Hebrew Calendar, Byzantine Calendar, et al.. There are several variations in where the epoch year has been placed, including a possible difference of 1732 years. But they do not really affect A.M. 1984 being the first 1984, chronologically.
For simplicity, all years in this answer are Common Era unless otherwise stated.
The next earliest year numbered 1984 in a major calendar is Anno Graecorum 1984 in the Seleucid Calendar. There is some slight ambiguity inasmuch as not only did the Christian world quite agree on one calendar in 1674, and not only did it not agree on when 1674 began, but also the Seleucid calendar could have used either Babylonian or Macedonian conventions for when the year started, neither of which agree with the almost 2 millennia later conventions for Christian calendars. But it does not really affect the answer here, either.
— Rolf Strootman (2015). "Seleucid Era". Encyclopædia Iranica.
— Alan E. Samuel (1972). "The Seleucid Calendar". Greek and Roman Chronology: Calendars and Years in Classical Antiquity Volume 1. C. H. Beck. ISBN 9783406033483.
Hubert George Wells's novel The War Of The Worlds was published this year. It had been serialized in a magazine the year before, and written a couple of years before that. Since the challenge was for chronological ordering, one can pick any of these years and not change the answer.
— Peter J. Beck (2016). The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474229890.
Buck Rogers, 25th Century A.D. was a spinoff of a novella from the year before. The character was Anthony Rogers, not Buck, in the original; and this spinoff was not quite the name that people will be familiar with today, although when it became popular again a half a century later this original name was not used for republished collections of the comic strips.
Those of you who enjoy Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade will enjoy the fact that "Buck" was the name of John F. Dille's dog.
— "NOWLAN, Phillip Francis", in Curtis C. Smith Twentieth-century Science-fiction Writers. St James Press. 1986. ISBN 9780912289274.
— Phil Nowlan, Russell Keaton, and Rick Yager (2010).Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: The Complete Newspaper Sundays: Volume One 1930–1933. Hermes Press. ISBN 9781932563405.
Although it did not have the cool spaceship models and a man dressed in an eagle costume that only came around with the telly, it did have Wilma Deering and Doctor Huer. The CBS radio series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century premiered in 1932 in the United States of America and was sponsored by, amongst other things, Cream of Wheat, Kellogg's, Popsicle, General Foods, and Coco-Malt.
— Vincent Terrace (2015). Radio Program Openings and Closings, 1931–1972 McFarland. ISBN 9781476612232.
George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published this year. There are some later editions which have 1984 on the cover, but the original title was in words.
People did cotton on quickly to the fact that this meant that 1984 earlier on the list was perhaps something else.
Another way in which the search engine users can be held to account is that there are only a few things that strictly match the items given on the list. The search engine users can earn penalties, if you choose, by matching too much. The Haskin/Pal movie named The War Of The Worlds released this year is one of the few television/movie adaptations that does not change the title.
— Peter J. Beck (2016). The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474229890.
— Jonathan Bignell (2014). "Anything can happen in the next half-hour" in Tobias Hochscherf, James Leggott, Donald E. Palumbo; British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays. McFarland. ISBN 9780786484836.
This year's telly program adaptation of the Orwell story was called Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This year's movie adaptation of the Orwell story was called 1984.
Gerry Anderson had a lot of things named "Century 21", and was well ahead of the pack by doing this in the 1960s. Century 21 Productions was the production company, earlier called Anderson Studios and AP Films, whose name was splashed on the titles of Captain Scarlet as "A Gerry Anderson Century 21 Television Production". (Although some say the name changed in 1966, Shubrook says that it had changed by 1966, and Bignell says 1965.) There was a Century 21 Music that did soundtrack music and a Century 21 Toys that did toy merchandising.
Fun fact: Nicholas Parsons did some work for AP Films.
This was also the year that 1984, the jazz music album by Yusef Latif, was released.
— Alan Shubrook (2007). Century 21 FX: Unseen Untold : Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, The Secret Service, UFO. Shubrook Bros. ISBN 9780955610103.
— Ian Fryer (2017). The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson: The Story Behind International Rescue. Fonthill Media.
— Jonathan Bignell (2014). "Anything can happen in the next half-hour" in Tobias Hochscherf, James Leggott, Donald E. Palumbo; British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays. McFarland. ISBN 9780786484836.
Although in its own fictional world it was September the 13th, 1999; in reality it was September 1975 that Gerry Anderson's telly series Space 1999 premiered.
— John Kenneth Muir (2015). "Introduction". Exploring Space: 1999: An Episode Guide and Complete History of the Mid-1970s Science Fiction Television Series. McFarland. ISBN 9780786455270
2000 A.D., the comic that gave us Judge Dredd, was first published this year.
— Mel Gibson (2023). "Readers and Fans: Lived Comics Cultures" in Maheed Ahmed; The Cambridge Companion to Comics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781009255684.
Although you may know the musical from 2005, the album Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds came out in 1978. Strictly speaking, the full title on the LP album cover is Jeff Wayne's Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds, which of course would have led people up the garden path to the 2005 musical even more.
— John L. Flynn (2005). War of the Worlds: From Wells to Spielberg. Galactic Books. ISBN 9780976940005>
Memorable for Dr Theo, Twiki, a robot that said "Bidi, Bidi, Bidi." all of the time for some reason, and Erin Gray; the television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century premiered in September 1979.
— Patrick Jankiewicz with Erin Gray contributor (2015). Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: A TV Companion. BearManor Media. ISBN 9781593931711.
The history is a little tricky here, as Microsoft Xenix arrived gradually over a range of processors and via a range of third-party resellers rather than directly to the public from Microsoft, Microsoft only really starting to do that sort of thing in earnest with its operating systems with MS-DOS 5 a decade later. But it was being marketed to resellers in Z8000, PDP-11, 8086, and 68000 flavours on the pages of the likes of the November 1981 Computerworld and was on show at ComDex in November 1982.
Anthony Phillips released xyr album 1984, and Rick Wakeman likewise released xyr album 1984, this year.
— Mark S. Usino (1983). "Introduction to the Xenix Operating System" in Microsystems, Volume 4. Libes.
Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two was published this year. The 1984 movie was rather titled 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Also released this year was Knight Rider, the television series where the world met the Knight Industries Two Thousand.
Fun fact: I recognized William Daniels's voice from St Elsewhere, and for a long time wondered why xe was never credited. It took many years until Daniels's autobiography came out that it was finally firmly settled that Daniels xyrself had actually requested no billing for the part, thereby becoming a telly trivia question forever.
— William Daniels (2017). There I Go Again: How I Came to Be Mr. Feeny, John Adams, Dr. Craig, KITT, and Many Others. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 9781612348520 .
The MSX standard for home computers was agreed this year by Microsoft, NEC, Hitachi, Matsushita, Sony, Canon, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Fuijitsu, Kyocera, General, Yamaha, Pioneer, Sanyo, and JVC.
The Santa Cruz Operation had resold Microsoft Xenix for some years, but this is when SCO Xenix proper actually came out. SCO and Microsoft released a Xenix port for the Apple Lisa this year, with SCO Multiscreen.
This is also the year that ZSoft released PC Paintbrush, a graphics editing tool whose image file format was named PCX.
And, of course, this is the year Anno Domini 1984, in the Christian calendar, that the non-search-engine users would likely think of.
Conversely, Van Halen's album has MCMLXXXIV on its cover, not 1984.
Someone did manage to bring out a movie this year titled Nineteen Eighty-Four. It had John Hurt in it, and John Hurt counts.
— James D. Murray and William VanRyper (1996). "PCX". Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats. O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN 9781565921610.
Brian M. Stableford's and David Langford's The Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000–3000 was published this year.
The Commodore Amiga 2000 was advertised in the magazines from the start of this year, and came out some time around June.
The Commodore Amiga 3000 came out this year.
David Hasslehoff and K.I.T.T. returned in the telly movie Knight Rider 2000 this year. In the original telly series we had had K.A.R.R.. Here, we encountered K.I.T.T. in a new body and the Knight Industries Four Thousand.
— Nickianne Moody (2013). "A lone crusader in the dangerous world: Heroes of science and technology in Knight Rider", in Anna Gough-Yates and Bill Osgerby; Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks. Routledge. ISBN 9781136358654.
Neither Hasslehoff nor K.I.T.T. were in Knight Rider 2010 this year. The car was not named, and the electronic helper to the protagonists was named Hannah.
— Vincent Terrace (2015). "Knight Rider". Crime Fighting Heroes of Television: Over 10,000 Facts from 151 Shows, 1949–2001 McFarland. ISBN 9780786484454.
SeaQuest 2032 was not called that until its third season in 1995. It started out as SeaQuest DSV in 1993.
I leave it to pubgoers to argue about whether the "s" should be capitalized. I'll just throw in the spanner that on the various home media releases it is in all-caps, the 1994 tie-in novel by Diane Duane has "SeaQuest" in its blurb, and the 1994 tie-in novel by David Bischoff has "Seaquest" in most bibliographies and two different capitalizations on its cover.
— Joseph McBride (2011). Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Second Edition. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781604738377.
The PC98 specification for personal computers, created by Intel and Microsoft, came out this year.
— PC 98 System Design Guide. Microsoft Press. 1997. ISBN 9781572317161.
If you are holding the search engine using people to the rules, then they also have to list this, the 1998 video game titled Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds. There was also a 1999 video game, if you want to be really evil sticklers.
This is also the year, and not 1999 as implied by some wikis on the World Wide Web that the search engine users will find, that Croydon Council published Croydon Vision 2020.
— "The Croydonization of South London?", in Nicholas A. Phelps, N. Parsons, Dimitris Ballas, and Andrew Dowling; Post-Suburban Europe: Planning and Politics at the Margins of Europe's Capital Cities. Springer. 2006. ISBN 9780230625389.
Although not retailing until it was actually 2000, Microsoft's operating system Windows NT 5.0, known by marketers as Windows 2000, was released to manufacturing in December 1999.
The Dublin Millennium Bridge was opened in 2000, becoming the 14th bridge across the Liffey.
And whilst everyone else was going forwards this year, Apple was going backwards, from Indo-Arabic numerals to Roman ones: with MacOS version 9 being followed by MacOS X.
Although the joke was used elsewhere, 30th Century Fox made its most direct and explicit appearance in the 2001-02-25 episode of Futurama titled "That's Lobstertainment".
And whilst it was floated into place to much fanfare in November 2000, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge was only opened to the public on 2001-09-17. Its "official" opening by the Queen was in 2002; but in accordance with the challenge's idea of facing reality, it is better to go with when the bridge was actually open for use.
— Christian Schlegel (2014). Futurama: Looking Backward at Present Day America. Anchor Academic Publishing. ISBN 9783954892976.
— Paul Brown (2022). The Tyne Bridge: Icon of North-East England. Hurst Publishers. ISBN 9781787389861.
A Мост Милленнум (which translates as Millennium Bridge) was inaugurated in 2005 to celebrate the millennium of the city of Казань (Kazan), the capital city of the Russian Federated Republic of Tatarstan which is estimated to have been founded somewhere around 1004–1005 CE, and crossing the Kazanka River. This entry was a very strong clue to the fact that search engine users were expected to think of more things than just one millennium and one calendar.
There was also a bridge inaugurated this year in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, which in Mongenegrin Cyrillic is actually Мост Миленијум rather than Мост Миллениум, and Montenegrin Latin is Most Milenijum.
Also released this year were in fact two things named H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds and one named The War Of The Worlds. The former two were a mockbuster movie by The Asylum, and an independent movie by Pendragon Pictures; the mockbuster cashing on in the attention to the third, the DreamWorks/Paramount movie with Tom Cruise.
Fun fact: The Pendragon Pictures movie was the only one set in the same country as the 1898 novel. It went straight to DVD and in Bignell's words is "somewhat elusive", which seems to be code for almost no copies of it now exist.
Roger Miret and the Disasters released their album 1984 this year.
— Peter J. Beck (2016). The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474229890.
— Jonathan Bignell (2014). "Anything can happen in the next half-hour" in Tobias Hochscherf, James Leggott, Donald E. Palumbo; British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays. McFarland. ISBN 9780786484836.
The Millennium Dome may have been opened in 1999 by the Queen, but it was opened as The O2 Arena years later with Bon Jovi.
— Angela Youngman (2023). The Royal Lover's Guide to London. White Owl. ISBN 9781399001731.
Given the 1980s and 1990s telly history, it is amusing that titular 2010 almost had to roll around in actual reality, with the 2008 telly series named Knight Rider, for the world to meet the Knight Industries Three Thousand.
— Vincent Terrace (2020). "Vehicles". The Television Treasury: Onscreen Details from Sitcoms, Dramas and Other Scripted Series, 1947–2019. McFarland. ISBN 9781476640327.
Although at one point Gerry Anderson used this name in the 20th century, the actual 21st century production company named Century 21 Films is sort of like a tribute band, that started off in 2014 with its documentary Filmed in Supermarionation.
The year 1984 in the Indian National Calendar will be arriving fairly soon.
The year Anno Hegirae 1984 is still some way off.