What was going on when I was born?

The Algerian Government, having reached an agreement to sell natural gas to France at prices well above market levels, has been pressing the United States and Italy to sign similar long-term contracts. But after prolonged negotiations, it seems unlikely that the parties will be able to come to terms. The three American companies involved in the talks - Southern Natural Gas, Consolidated Natural Gas and Columbia Gas Transmission - have strongly resisted Algerian demands that the price of natural gas, in terms of its energy content, be equivalent to the price of Algeria's high-quality crude oil. And the Italian Government, which helped build a $3 billion gas pipeline that runs 1,200 miles from Algerian gas fields, through Tunisia and under the Mediterranean to Sicily, is reported to be so irritated at the price demands that it is prepared to let the line remain idle.

Members of New York's Congressional delegation, presented for the first time with official information on the reapportionment plan agreed to in Albany, began yesterday to assess the implications of new district lines that will put some of them out of office. Representative Barber B. Conable Jr., Republican of Rochester and the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that the plan gave him a more congenial district than he had expected last week. ''I am much more likely to run,'' the eight-term Congressman said in a telephone interview from Rochester. ''I would probably not have run on the basis of the district they were talking about last week.''

Many of the nation's largest chemical companies are shutting down their phosphate operations in Florida in the face of sharply lower sales of chemical fertilizer in the United States and abroad. Seven of the state's 23 phosphate strip mines and five of its 18 processing plants have been closed on an indefinite basis, idling about 2,800 workers, according to Robert Bonnell, a spokesman for the Florida Phosphate Council, an industry trade group. He said that additional layoffs in Florida, which accounts for most of the country's phosphate production, are expected later this month and would bring the number of unemployed to 3,400, or about 25 percent of the industry's 14,600 workers. ''Spring should be our peak sales season,'' Mr. Bonnell said in an interview. ''Instead, we are shutting down plants and laying off workers.''

International A U.S.-Soviet arms control plan was proposed by President Reagan in an address to the graduating class of Eureka College in Illinois, his alma mater. It would initially call for both sides to reduce by onethird their nuclear warheads on land-and sea-based ballistic missiles. This would reduce to about 5,000 the number of warheads possessed by each country, the first step toward their acceptance of an ''equal ceiling'' on the ''throw weight'' or total payload of nuclear weapons of all kinds, the President said. He said that he has written to Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, suggesting that formal negotiations start at the end of June. (Page A1, Column 6.) Soviet leaders will not approve any strategic arms reduction deal that requires a ''unilateral reduction by the Soviet Union while permitting a buildup by the United States,'' the Communist Party newspaper Pravda said. The article appeared before President Reagan's speech in Illinois proposing that the United States and the Soviet Union reduce nuclear warheads by one-third. (A15:2-5.)

Precinct 23 One Neighborhood Battles Crime First of a series appearing periodically. By M. A. FARBER It was a ''good collar,'' the kind of arrest that distinguishes an eight-hour tour of duty. For a while the other night, it lifted spirits at the Precinct 23 station house. Every few weeks in recent months, the Cake Boutique, a bakery at Lexington Avenue and 87th Street, had been held up, apparently by the same man. The first time, the employees said, he brandished a gun; the second time he simulated one. Thereafter he didn't bother - like a regular patron who favors the same pastry, he would saunter in and remind the employees that they knew what he wanted.

Argentina said today that British warships and helicopters attacked Argentine positions in the Falkland Islands and that British fighter planes sank a fishing boat offshore. The renewed fighting, the first since last Tuesday, came as senior Argentine Government officials said Argentina was willing to withdraw its forces from the Falklands without a prior guarantee of sovereignty. One senior Government official said Argentina would settle for a negotiating structure that ''inexorably must aim at recognition'' of Argentine sovereignty over the Falklands. The official said, however, that his Government was no longer demanding an ironclad guarantee.

Rick Robey, the Boston Celtics' 6-foot-10-inch, 240-pound backup center, has never been noted for his scoring. In his four pro seasons, Robey's role has been to provide strength off the bench. Robey did that and more today in the Celtics' 121-81 rout of the Philadelphia 76ers in the opening game of the four-of-seven-game Eastern Conference championship series at the Boston Garden. Robey entered the game at the start of the second quarter with Boston ahead, 30-24. He scored 15 of his 19 points before halftime. Eleven of those points paced a 22-6 spree and opened the way for the 76ers' worst playoff defeat and Boston's greatest playoff victory.

Sugar Ray Leonard, the world welterweight champion, underwent two hours of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore yesterday to repair a partially detached retina in his left eye. Doctors said they believed he would be able to resume his boxing career before the end of the year. ''It's much too early to tell, but he should be fully recovered within four to six months,'' said Dr. Ronald G. Michels, associate professor of ophthalmology at the hospital's Wilmer Eye Institute, who directed the three-surgeon team in the operation. When Dr. Michels was asked at a news conference following the surgery if Leonard would be able to take a punch again, he said: ''It's all up to the individual. Some people can and some people cannot, but if it heals as it should, he should be able to take blows. His vision was good going into the operation, and it should be good coming out.''

Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, after a second day of talks with Argentina and Britain, said tonight that ''important progress'' had been made in the effort to end the fighting over the Falkland Islands. His view was supported by the British delegate, Sir Anthony Parsons. The Argentine representative, Deputy Foreign Minister Enrique Ros, tight-lipped in public throughout the negotiations, declined comment, but other Latin sources said the Secretary General's assessment was fair. Mr. Perez de Cuellar said that gains had been made on some points, but that ''on some others, we need clarification.'' He would not specify what these were.

President Reagan's first comprehensive speech on East-West relations seems to mark a major shift in his own thinking about dealing with the Soviet Union that may even overshadow his specific proposals on sharply reducing each side's strategic arsenals. By calling for the start of talks on strategic arms as soon as next month without any conditions, and in suggesting that he and Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, could achieve ''positive results'' when they agree on a time and place to sit down and talk, Mr. Reagan has moved a long way since his early post-election statements that tightly linked arms control talks with Soviet ''policies of aggression'' around the world. Also, the generally firm but conciliatory speech in Eureka, Ill., in which he said that Soviet leaders shared his ''overriding interest in preventing the use of nuclear weapons,'' showed that after 16 months in office, Mr. Reagan was talking in a much more diplomatic way than in his first Presidential news conference, on Jan. 29, 1981, when he said that Soviet leaders had reserved ''the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.'' Mr. Reagan, Administration officials said today, is being driven by a combination of factors. On the one hand, a senior aide said, despite the initial bluster of the Administration toward the Russians, Mr. Reagan personally has always believed in the value of discussion to resolve issues.

For some years, it has become quite the rage for companies to increase the number of outsiders who make up their boards in order to stem criticism that directors can't be master and slave to their boss at the same time. Recently, however, some doubters have focused attention on an unusual commingling in the board room - the outside director who does double duty as a company consultant. AMAX Inc., the big mining company, irked some board room watchers when it divulged that six of its outside directors worked as wellpaid consultants to AMAX. The company has two inside and sixteen outside directors. Four With Continuing Pacts The six in question include four with continuing pacts: former President Gerald R. Ford, who, in addition to his director stipend, gets $100,000 a year for his advice; former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who is paid $75,000; Ian MacGregor, a former AMAX chairman, who receives $170,000, and Gordon Reed, an independent businessman, who earns $65,000.

The top executives of the nation's major corporations, who gathered here over the weekend for the semiannual meeting of the Business Council, were generally pessimistic about the economy and uncertain about what the future holds. The executives, many of whom were the chief cheerleaders for the Reagan economic program a year ago, have been chastised by the deepening recession. But despite the weak High interest rates and a depressed economy helped to cause some of the worst earnings declines in years for major corporations in the first quarter. Page D10. performance of the economy in the first year and a half of the Reagan Administration, many of the business executives said that they still supported the President's policies over all.