What was going on when I was born?

In 1893, an inventor named Joseph Duncan breezed into Chicago to find his fortune with an automatic addressing machine. He sold a dozen of them in a year's time and was heartened enough to form the Addressograph Company in 1896. Meanwhile, Henry Gammeter had concocted a machine that could duplicate a complete line or a complete page of characters at a single stroke. In December 1902, he formed the American Multigraph Company in Chicago. For several decades, the two companies went their separate ways, though their products often churned away side by side in many American offices. It was a logical marriage, then, when the two joined forces as the Addressograph-Multigraph Corporation in 1930.

A court order prohibiting all work on a Hudson River landfill needed for the Westway highway project was issued yesterday in Manhattan, carrying out a court decision concerning the project's effect on striped bass. The order prohibits ''all activities relating to Westway that affect the waters or bed of the Hudson River,'' including the demolition of some piers that was supposed to begin this month. Work on the planned 200-acre landfill itself was not scheduled to begin until later.

AM International Inc., the old Addressograph-Multigraph Corporation that has been struggling for months to overcome rising debts and continuing losses, announced today that it had filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Act while it tried to reorganize. The Chicago-based company, one of the nation's oldest and bestknown suppliers of office equipment and information processing systems, attributed its action to its negative net worth and its $254 million in debt. ''As a result of AM's recent losses and write-downs, its deficient net worth and high debt levels, the company needed concessions from a broad base of lenders,'' said Joe B. Freeman Jr., who took over in late February as AM's chairman and chief executive officer. ''The complexity of our debt structure and the magnitude of interest concessions required were proving too great a barrier to overcome.''

In some copies yesterday, a sports article about a labor complaint filed by the National Football League Players Association incorrectly identified the Kansas City newspaper that had polled a number of players. It was The Kansas City Times.

President Reagan said today that he ''was neither ruling out nor ruling in'' an income tax surcharge being proposed in an effort to break the stalemate on the budget for the fiscal year 1983. White House officials also signaled Mr. Reagan's willingness to consider such a tax increase. But, despite this indication of flexibility from the White House at a news conference, the Senate majority leader, Howard H. Baker Jr., joined the bipartisan Congressional effort to spur Mr. Transcript of news session, page D20.

The Stroh Brewery Company of Michigan, the nation's No.7 beer maker, said yesterday that its $325 million offer to buy two-thirds of the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company of Wisconsin had attracted 68 percent of Schlitz's stock. The response normally would mean victory for Stroh, whose offer of $16 a share for at least 67 percent of the outstanding shares was opposed by Schlitz. But that may not be the case.