What was going on when I was born?

Working quietly out of an abandoned Brooklyn warehouse, a special task force of Federal marshals and New York City detectives arrested 303 fugitives and career criminals in a 10-week roundup that ended yesterday, officials said. ''This was a major operation,'' said Thomas C. Kupferer, the chief inspector in charge of enforcement for the United States Marshals Service, who credited the success of the operation to ''the concept of saturation and concentration of resources'' - 40 marshals and detectives working in three-man teams. Those arrested, he said, included murderers, narcotics dealers, armed robbers and others considered among the most elusive of the estimated 6,000 Federal fugitives as well as many ''most wanted'' suspects sought by New York authorities.

Store buyers and gallery owners scurry from booth to booth seeking the handmade wares their customers have developed a craving for in recent years. The demand grows: Crafts are now a $2 billion industry in America. Sales at Rhinebeck last summer were $5 million, up $500,000 from the year before. ''Paid attendance last year was 47,000,'' said Carol Sedestrom, president of American Craft Enterprises, the American Craft Council subsidiary that runs the fair. ''We needed more room so we moved the tents and opened up the fairgrounds to make a bigger space.''

Two teen-agers were arrested yesterday in the fatal beating of a transit worker in Brooklyn on Tuesday by a taunting group of young men. The police said the attack was unprovoked and racially motivated. It occurred when the man and two fellow transit employees were on their way home from work and their car stalled. The three victims, all of whom were black, were set upon by a group of white youths in the predominantly white section of Gravesend.

Israeli planes, tanks and artillery attacked Syrian positions just south of the Beirut-Damascus highway today as a cease-fire announced by Israel Tuesday night collapsed. Intense exchanges of fire continued through the day, with fighting reported at nine or more places along the highway and some on the approaches to Beirut. The American Embassy, which is in west Beirut, is closing Thursday, and all Americans here have been urged to leave. An American ship is due to leave for Cyprus on Thursday from the port of Junieh north of Beirut. There are 2,000 to 3,000 Americans in Lebanon.

The Big Three auto makers reported today that new car sales fell 21.9 percent in the June 11-20 selling period, the first drop in auto sales in more than a month. General Motors, the nation's largest auto maker, led the decline with a drop of 25.4 percent compared with the similar period last year. Sales by the Ford Motor Company were off 16.8 percent, while the Chrysler Corporation reported a sales drop of 13.7 percent. Analysts attributed G.M.'s big sales decline to the lack of an additional incentive program after the ending of a 12.8 percent financing program on May 31. In that program, G.M. provided new car financing at a 12.8 percent interest rate to qualified buyers.

The New York State Court of Appeals, overturning two lower courts, found today that the state's system of financing its public schools was constitutional and that there was no constitutional requirement that school spending be equal among districts. The decision came on one of the most strenuously debated issues in New York and around the country: Whether state education money should be used to equalize spending between rich and poor school systems. The court, the state's highest, did note that wealthier districts were able Ruling and dissent excerpts, page B6. to spend more for the education of their pupils than could either poorer districts or urban areas. But the judges ruled 6 to 1 that these inequalities did not invalidate the state's education financing system.

A late rally spurred by news of Senate passage of the compromise Federal budget plan sent the Dow Jones industrial average up 13.51 points yesterday, its biggest daily gain in three months, in very heavy trading. The blue-chip average, which was ahead only 3.28 points at 3 P.M., closed at 813.17, gaining more than 10 points in the final hour. The increase in the Dow yesterday was its best one-day gain since the indicator rose 13.89 points on March 22. So far this week the average has risen almost 25 points, including a 9.71 rise on Tuesday, after the House passed the identical budget plan approved by the Senate yesterday.

The Federal Communications Commission opened a broad new avenue of television broadcasting today by approving final rules for direct satellite-to-home transmission. The move means that consumers, by mounting disk antennas two and a half feet in diameter on their rooftops, will be able to receive 30 or more television channels, some possibly as early as 1986. The broadcasts are expected to be as clear as anything on cable, and some are likely to offer viewers stereo sound for the first time. The service is expected to appeal especially to residents of rural areas where reception is poor and program choices are few, but the broadcasters expect to win millions of city subscribers as well, particularly those who are not served by cable systems.

Hitachi Ltd., a leading Japanese computer manufacturer, said today that it had authorized the payment of $540,000 for confidential computer information belonging to the International Business Machines Corporation. Hitachi said it was still studying the legality of the payment, which was made to a consulting firm that apparently was a decoy used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Buying information from research firms is common within the computer industry, and the key questions seemed to be whether Hitachi knew that it was paying for stolen information and whether it was coerced by Federal agents. ''It seems that Hitachi stepped into the trap,'' said Yasushi Sayama, a spokesman for Hitachi in Tokyo. The startling admission came in an

Three high school biology textbooks have been rejected for use in the New York City public schools because of what Board of Education officials say is an inadequate treatment of the Darwinian theory of evolution. The publishers of two of the three books have been told that their books are additionally unacceptable because of what school officials termed an uncritical endorsement of the creationism theory, which is based on the Bible. Darwin's theory states that organisms developed from earlier forms by hereditary transmission of slight variations over successive generations. The creationists, on the other hand, hold that species were created as they now appear.

Because of an editing error, an article in The Living Section yesterday about wood for cooking included incorrect information on buying mesquite. A minimum wholesale order from Ranchmen's Manufacturing of Dallas is 300 cases at $12.50 a case.

An article in Metropolitan Report May 21 on the Stadt Huys excavation in lower Manhattan where artifacts and building foundations from the early Dutch occupation of New York have been found incorrectly reported the date of the original discovery. The foundations were unearthed in 1970.