Friday, July 22, 2011

The joy of Wikipedia

It was pointed out to me that the entry for IRNA, the Iranian government's news agency, lists their website as having started in 1981.



This is very impressive. In 1981 I was in high school. My computer at the time was a TRS-80 (top-of-the-line model, with 16K of RAM!) and in spite of all that technical saavy I'd never heard of webpages. I didn't learn about such things until the mid-90's, during my residency.
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13 comments:

  1. ER's MomJuly 22, 2011 at 9:17 PM

    neener-neener!

    I was in elementary school in 1981. But I remember programming the TRS-80, using cassette tapes to save my programs.

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  2. Grumpy, M.D.July 22, 2011 at 9:22 PM

    Oh yeah. Had to type in "CLOAD" and "CSAVE" to load or save programs. And that great BASIC-I computer language.

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  3. AnonymousJuly 22, 2011 at 9:51 PM

    Just FYI, "websites" as we usually use the term didn't exist until 1990 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website). Methinks that wikipedia article needs a [citation needed] tag.

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  4. Not HouseJuly 22, 2011 at 10:10 PM

    That's okay, our EMR at the hospital still runs on DOS.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousJuly 22, 2011 at 10:20 PM

    Unless they're using the Islamic calendar, in which case the website was founded in 2543 and they're blogging from the future!

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  6. RevSteveWJuly 23, 2011 at 1:50 AM

    Could give them the benefit of the doubt, and they mean they had a BBS then (bulletin board you dialled in to), but yeah, otherwise my guess is their PR mean is a 20-something who thinks the internet has been around forever

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  7. Officer CynicalJuly 23, 2011 at 6:53 AM

    One of us was somewhere other than in the middle of the bell curve. My first computer was a kit-built Heath-Zenith 8088, with not just 1 but 2 (!) floppy drives.

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  8. webhillJuly 23, 2011 at 7:03 AM

    Go ahead Ibee. Edit Wikipedia. You know you want to. The first web server didn't go online til 1991 :)

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  9. Ben SJuly 23, 2011 at 4:41 PM

    I'm sure there was information on Iran somewhere in ARPANET..

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  10. AnonymousJuly 25, 2011 at 11:14 AM

    I feel so old. Sent my first email on ARPANET when I was a little girl (Dad was fooling with it at work. He was not a computer guru or engineer, but thought the things had promise, was in the military and I was amazed to get a message back from the person I sent the message to in short order)
    As a teen, I used a "dumb" terminal to learn BASIC.This was a special course on Saturday mornings for the allegedly smart people. While in college, had to use punch cards (look them up kids) to do statistical analysis of a Psyc experiment. My roommmate at the time was a Math/Physics major, one of the High Priestesses of the VAX (look that antique up, too) and asked, "What are YOU doing in my domain" when I came into use the card feeder to put in my punch cards.
    After I married, my (no ex) husband and I got a TRS-80. My then husband spent hours inputting his record collection.
    Then Windows 3.1 and we were off ...

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  11. SaraJuly 27, 2011 at 10:19 AM

    I wasn't even born in 1981 :-)

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  12. EricaJuly 31, 2011 at 1:13 PM

    I was born in 1981, and remember learning BASIC in elementary school, by the Turtle-Steps method. Ah, such fond memories of that little green triangle.

    My dad is a hardware engineer that specializes in communication, so we had internet at home almost as soon as it was available. After which I inadvertantly discovered Rule 34, and stopped being shocked by practically anything.

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  13. heterodyneAugust 24, 2011 at 5:44 PM

    It's a typo. OF COURSE the site was launched in 1891.

    ReplyDelete

So wadda you think?