What was going on when I was born?

A ''one case, one judge'' system of assigning criminal and civil cases will be put into effect in New York State in January under guidelines just drafted by a court-appointed panel, officials said yesterday. Under the system, cases will be assigned to one judge from start to finish. Over time, the panel said, the system ''is expected to yield perceptible benefits in terms of the quality of judicial decision-making and the quality of administration of the case process.'' Under the existing master-calendar system, cases wend their way to different sets of courtrooms. These are designated to handle particular procedures, such as motions or trials. Courtrooms are presided over by judges who, to relieve caseloads elsewhere and to distribute workloads, are rotated, too.

A public prosecutor in Italy was reported tonight to have charged four Palestinians with murder and kidnapping in the hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro. Italian officials also struggled to resolve a diplomatic impasse over what to do with two senior Palestinian officials who were aboard the Egyptian airliner with the four accused hijackers. The two were flown to Rome aboard the Egyptian airliner tonight. American officials urged Italy to investigate the two Palestinians to see if they, too, should be charged in the hijacking and other crimes. At the same time, the Egyptians were insisting that the two Palestinian representatives were their guests and should be immune from investigation.

President Reagan said today that a White House doctor removed additional skin cancer cells from his nose in a ''minor operation'' on Thursday. He said he had now been assured that ''my nose is clean.'' Mr. Reagan was wearing a patch on the right side of his nose when he appeared before reporters to discuss the Navy's successful interception of an Egyptian plane carrying Palestinian hijackers on Thursday. He said he was announcing the skin removal because ''I figured you might ask'' about the patch.

President Reagan expressed confidence today that the diversion of the cruise ship hijackers to Italy had ''sent a message to terrorists everywhere: 'You can run, but you can't hide.' '' As legislators of both parties warmly praised the President's decision to order Navy F-14 jets to intercept an Egyptian airliner carrying four suspected terrorists on Thursday, the White House announced that the United States would seek to extradite the Palestinians from Italy. The Italian Government is planning to place the four on trial for the ship hijacking and the murder of a wheelchair-bound New Yorker, Leon Klinghoffer. ''What we want is justice done,'' Mr. Reagan said at a brief White House news conference. ''They could be tried in both countries.''

Shortly after noon Thursday, Eastern daylight time, President Reagan conferred in a private office at a cake factory near Chicago and, after weighing the risks, decided to try to intercept an Egyptian civilian jet with United States fighter aircraft. Mr. Reagan was told that intelligence experts expected that the plane would soon be flying from Cairo with the four hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, and the President decided to try and force them away from a safe haven and into a court of justice. His order was racing through Pentagon channels by 1:30 P.M. The bold plan for an airborne operation to seize some initiative from international terrorists was conceived and presented to the President early Thursday morning, according to White House officials. Fighter Planes Are Scrambled After he gave initial approval at midday in Illinois, F-14 fighter planes were scrambled from the American aircraft carrier Saratoga and were flying over the Mediterranean at 2:15 P.M. Eastern time - it was already evening in Europe - to await his final order. At 4:37 P.M., as he returned to Washington on Air Force One after his visit to the Chicago area, the President received confirmation that the Egyptian plane had taken off 22 minutes earlier, and he issued his final instruction to have the armed fighters carry out the interception plan.

The seizing of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and the capture of the hijackers has left several unanswered questions, including these: How much did Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, know about the plan to hijack the ship? Was the United States prepared to use force if the airliner refused the order to go to Italy?

Suddenly, after years of faceless mobs and vanishing gunmen and anonymous martyrs driving dynamite-packed trucks, someone had been caught. Four terrorists - with faces, with names - were in Western hands, formally charged and facing trial for hijacking an Italian cruise ship and executing an American passenger. And for the American public, from Manhattan subway stops to Los Angeles construction sites, the capture of the Palestinian guerrillas by Navy fliers provoked patriotism and euphoria and unleashed a taste for retribution that has been building for years. Unlike the reaction to the release of the American hostages from Iran, the mood yesterday was not celebratory - flags, champagne, yellow ribbons - as much as it was deliberate and, often, vengeful.

The 1985 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a five-year-old Boston-based group that was jointly founded by American and Soviet doctors. The physicians group has a membership of 135,000 people in 41 countries. One of its co-founders, Dr. Yevgeny I. Chazov, has been the personal physician of the top Soviet leadership and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee since 1982. He has also been a Deputy Minister of Health since 1968. After learning of the award today, Dr. Bernard Lown, the American co-founder of the group, immediately urged President Reagan to stop all nuclear testing.

Last weekend, when the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Yankees to clinch the Eastern Division of the American League, it was as if Canada's biggest city had come of age. For Torontoans, the baseball team's successes in two of the first three playoff games against the Kansas City Royals has only heightened the sensation. ''It wasn't just that the Blue Jays had achieved the improbable,'' said Trent Frayne, who writes a sports column for The Globe and Mail. ''It was also that they'd beat the Yankees to do it, the damn Yankees, a team that has become a legend in America's game, a game that each year becomes a little more Canadian too.''

Students at a Roman Catholic university in Lublin, the only Catholic university in Eastern Europe, announced today that they would support a boycott of parliamentary elections on Sunday.

Ecuador severed diplomatic relations with Nicaragua today, accusing its President, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, of ''gross, inadmissible attacks on the dignity, sovereignty and independence'' of Ecuador. Foreign Minister Edgar Teran announced the break tonight, reading from a two-page declaration.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in the face of doubts within her party, today reaffirmed the economic policies that have guided her Government. Her steadfastness came in the face of a warning from a senior Cabinet member, Energy Secretary Peter Walker, that a failure to deal with unemployment would be ''political suicide'' for the Conservative Party. Closing the party's annual conference here, the Prime Minister insisted that no problem ''occupies more of my thinking'' than unemployment. Then, in a voice that was pitched to sound patient but sometimes came across as slightly vexed, she catalogued her Government's efforts to speed job creation.