What was going on when I was born?

Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir said today that Israel had not abandoned its determination to see simultaneous Syrian and Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon. Speaking on the Israeli television, Mr. Shamir said there had been some discussion among Reagan Administration officials ''on certain changes in the timetable of withdrawals.'' He added: ''We reject all changes like this. We think there is nothing to be gained from this. We think all sides must be faithful to the principle of simultaneous withdrawal. Furthermore, there was no discussion of changing this principle.''

The Supreme Court vindicated Raymond L. Dirks today, ruling that the securities analyst did not misuse inside information in warning several clients that the Equity Funding Corporation was about to collapse. The Court's 6-to-3 ruling went well beyond the Dirks case. It set significant new limits on the legal liability of those who make use of nonpublic information they receive from a corporate insider, usually an officer, director or major stockholder. In a strongly worded opinion today, Associate Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. said not only that the Securities and Exchange Commission was wrong to censure Mr. Dirks but also that the commission had taken an unduly rigid view of the law on insider trading.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said today that its inquiry into the 1980 Presidential campaign would probably require interviews with leading Reagan Administration officials. These officials include William J. Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, and James A. Baker 3d, chief of staff at the White House. As the investigation of alleged campaign abuses began to focus on the differing recollections of these two Reagan advisers, the Administration was suffering a separate, growing problem of internal friction centered on the same two principals. Staff speculation increased about possible resignations or dismissals, and partisans of Mr. Baker and Mr. Casey privately criticized one another over the 1980 incident in which Reagan aides obtained and used papers outlining President Carter's strategy for meeting Ronald Reagan in their showdown debate on national television.

R. Buckminster Fuller, the forward-looking inventor best known as the father of the geodesic dome, died of a heart attack yesterday while visiting his wife at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 87 years old. As he put it himself, with his customary cheerful immodesty, Mr. Fuller was an ''an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.'' He also was a throughgoing original, who for many years was dismissed as something of a crackpot. But by the 1950's, having stubbornly refused to abandon his beliefs that through technology ''man can do anything he needs to do'' and that ''man can create miracles,'' he had attracted a cultlike following.

Ten months after four Millburn (N.J.) High School students took Scholastic Aptitude Tests required for college entrance, a form letter from the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., arrived in the mail for each of them. ''In reviewing your scores,'' it said, the testing service's board of review ''found close agreement of your answers with those on another answer sheet from the same test center. Such agreement is unusual and suggests that copying occurred.'' In two weeks, the letter said, the scores would be canceled and the students' prospective colleges notified, unless they could give ''additional information'' to prove they had not cheated. It also gave them the options of taking new tests, appealing to impartial arbitrators or canceling their scores voluntarily.

A New York City official said yesterday that he would move before the end of the year to win the same level of cable television service in Manhattan that has been negotiated for the four other boroughs. ''Our desire is to get a universal contract,'' said Morris Tarshis, the city's Director of Franchises. His promise followed a long evening meeting of the Board of Estimate at City Hall Thursday. At the meeting, an agreement for six companies to start wiring the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island for cable service, tentatively approved a week earlier, had threatened to unravel.

In spite of everything, a few New York officials have a vision of a Criminal Court that could work. They imagine a court that would combine efficiency with justice; a court in which cases not warranting trials would be quickly disposed of and those that went to trial would be heard expeditiously; a court in which judges would treat misdemeanors seriously and mete out punishments that not only fit a particular criminal but also deterred others. They also admit they are optimists. ''Any time you get into this thing you're going to step on someone's toes,'' said State Senator H. Douglas Barclay, who as chief of the Senate's Task Force on Court Reorganization is sponsoring a plan for a major revamping of the state's court system. ''But we're on the teetering edge. Court reform has been around for 10 or 12 years and nothing has happened. This has a chance.'' Those most familiar with New York City's Criminal Court acknowledge the many seemingly intractable problems it faces. They also recognize the many obstacles - political, bureaucratic and financial - that stand in the way of change.

A conference of the world's rich and poor nations moved toward adjournment today with agreement near on a resolution that sidesteps the demands of the poor nations for emergency economic aid. A spokesman for Abdillahi Said Osman of Somalia, chairman of the Group of 77, a caucus of developing nations, said the third world would probably accept the resolution at a final session today. He said this would be done, though reluctantly, because rejection of the resolution might interrupt a dialogue with the industrial nations on economic issues. The proposed resolution, the subject of a night-long debate among delegates of the developing nations, represents a victory for the industrial countries. Its adoption would preserve formal dialogue with the developing world, without having to concede any of their major demands.

The Reagan Administration is moving toward setting up a commission that would seek a national consensus on policies involving Central America, Administration officials said today. The officials said the Administration was responding to a Senate resolution proposed June 15 by Henry M. Jackson and Charles McC. Mathias Jr. that called on the President to convene ''a national bipartisan commission to address the serious long-term problems of security, poverty and democratic development in Central America.''

If the image of Central America is one of mortar-pocked hills and people living on the edge of war and revolution, then this sultry Caribbean port is part of another world, living in another age. As the plane from Tegucigalpa flies over ridge after ridge of jagged green mountains on its way to this isolated city, Spanish America slips away. Gone are the red-tile roofs and white-plaster walls of the capital. Gone also is Latin formality. La Ceiba reflects a Caribbean or tropical African culture: wood-frame, tin-roofed houses, some on stilts, with their doors and windows open to commerce, to neighbors or to passers-by. Here, and in towns and villages along what Central Americans call their ''Atlantic'' coast, live the black Garifuna people, descendants of slaves or laborers brought to this edge of the Caribbean Sea by the British centuries ago when imperial England had designs on Central America. This black minority shares the dusty streets of La Ceiba with people of mixed ancestry from elsewhere in the region and with a floating population of seafarers, adventurers, con men, prospectors, smugglers and dropouts.

The Government dropped more than 50 names today from its roster of those who are forbidden by state decree to belong to organizations, attend meetings or have their words - spoken or written - printed in any form. Banning orders, as they are known, remained in force for 11 people, including Winnie Mandela, who is married to the imprisoned African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela. On Wednesday, with less than 72 hours to run until the expiration of all but one of the orders, Mrs. Mandela was served with her sixth banning order in 21 years, extending her banishment to a small Afrikaans community 200 miles south of here for five more years. Nine other people are also being rebanned, a police spokesman said, under a revision of the security law that came into force a year ago. Another person, the Rev. Beyers Naude, a dissident Afrikaner clergyman, had already been rebanned under the new law.

Guerrillas blew up two power pylons today and blacked out eastern El Salvador, an official of the stateowned electrical utility said. About 1.5 million people in Usulutan, San Miguel, La Union and Morazan Provinces were affected.