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.

13 comments:

ER's Mom said...

neener-neener!

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

Grumpy, M.D. said...

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

Anonymous said...

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.

Not House said...

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

Anonymous said...

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

RevSteveW said...

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

Officer Cynical said...

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.

webhill said...

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

Ben S said...

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

Anonymous said...

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 ...

Sara said...

I wasn't even born in 1981 :-)

Erica said...

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.

heterodyne said...

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

 
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