What was going on when I was born?

UNTIL Boston, Alberto Salazar was the proud prince, an unbeaten, unchallenged world-record holder. Dick Beardsley was serious and hard-working, improving with each new adventure, but hardly regal. Then came their duel. And it was a duel, down to the last straightaway, where an exhausted, dehydrated Salazar, his body temperature down to 88 degrees, somehow summoned one final kick. Salazar's margin of victory, after 26.2 miles, was 10 yards - two seconds. ''It was an emotional experience for both of us,'' Beardsley said later. It was more emotional than either realized. Since last April's Boston Marathon, Salazar and Beardsley have become America's Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, not competing against each other but linked by talk, training scuttlebutt, race times and the knowledge that they will meet again, in Sunday's 13th New York City Marathon.

A $40 million science center at Queens College and several other construction programs at the City University of New York and at a private college have been delayed by troubles at the New York State Dormitory Authority, officials of the authority and the City University said yesterday. Originally, when a government securities concern in which the authority had invested $302 million filed for bankruptcy in mid-August, the authority said it did not expect any practical effect on the schools and hospitals it serves. But the new acting executive director of the authority said yesterday that early assessments of the bankruptcy's effect had been too optimistic. ''I think at the beginning it was felt that the settlements would move along faster and that it wouldn't have any practical effect on the authority's programs,'' said the official, Arthur Bates. ''It's taken longer than we expected, but when it does get resolved, then we will be back in a position to issue more securities and go on with more projects.''

It was on Dec. 11, 1958, William Schuman recalled yesterday, that he went to the High School of Music and Art to tell the school's principal and members of the student body about his idea. He thought the high school should become part of the Lincoln Center complex, then not much more than an idea itself. The students thought otherwise. Twenty-four years ago they booed him, Mr. Schuman, the president emeritus of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, said at the cornerstone ceremony for the new Fiorello H. La Guardia High School at Lincoln Center. The school will be the new home for the High School of Music and Art, which is now at 135th Street and Convent Avenue, and the High School of Performing Arts, which is now at 120 West 46th Street.

The major-party candidates for the United States Senate, Florence M. Sullivan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, disagreed strongly about the state of the economy and legislation on abortion and birth control, in a debate held here today. Senator Moynihan, running for re-election as the Democratic and Liberal candidate, said the economy was in ''very bad shape.'' ''The President can't just go on saying this economic program is working if you wait long enough,'' Mr. Moynihan said. ''It's not working and it has to be changed.''

Damage and injury awards paid by New York City have increased more than tenfold since 1968, and now surpass the annual budgets of some principal city agencies, the City Comptroller said yesterday. An analysis by the Comptroller, Harrison J. Goldin, showed that last year the city settled claims and lawsuits for $120 million, and that it expected to spend as much this year. The 9,200 settlements last year covered everything from minor sewer backups and sideswipings of parked cars by sanitation trucks to malpractice at city hospitals and accidental shootings by city police officers. ''The outlook for judgments and claims costs to the city is grim,'' Mr. Goldin said. He issued recommendations giving city administrators information for identifying ''claim causing patterns.''

In less than three years, the economics of energy consumption has been radically transformed. Industrial nations, which struggled through the early 1970's at the mercy of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, now find themselves confronting excess oil production capacity and declining demand for oil. Increasingly, however, governments, oil companies and economists are looking beyond the current period of ample energy. Their forecasts, while promising a relatively stable energy market until the late 1980's, pose tough questions about how much longer it can last.

Edward Teller, the nuclear physicist widely credited with inventing the hydrogen bomb, visited President Reagan at the White House recently to give him an idea for another revolutionary weapon. The device might be stationed in space or launched into space at a moment's notice. Its core would be a small nuclear bomb and its power would be delivered by lasers. If the Soviet Union ever launched a mass missile attack against the United States, tracking instruments would point the lasers at the missiles, the nuclear bomb would explode, the radiation generated by the bomb would activate the lasers, and lethal light beams would flash toward the earth. Instantaneously, these beams would destroy vast numbers of the missiles in flight. Space technology scientists are not certain whether such a weapon could actually be made to work. But the fact that its possibilities are being discussed seriously by one of Mr. Reagan's most eminent scientific advisers illustrates the pressures that are building for an arms race in space.

It is now a year since President Reagan cut personal income taxes 5 percent and three and a half months since he cut them another 10 percent. But as yet the economic landscape remains almost barren of signs that the cuts have done much to help bring about a recovery. At best, many analysts say, the cuts have kept the economy from sliding further than it would have otherwise. The General Electric Company's chief economist, Walter K. Joelson, expressed deep concern when asked about the prospects for a consumer-led recovery. ''We don't see any action,'' he said. ''Nothing moves, believe me,'' not even the small appliances such as irons and blenders whose sales are not dependent on favorable financing costs.

''The motto of our group is 'Jus sapienter curret,' or 'Justice runs prudently.'

To cover Social Security payments to the elderly for November, officials of the Social Security agency say they plan for the first time to let the old-age trust fund borrow money. The authority to borrow was granted last year by Congress as a short-term response to a long-standing financial problem. Two or three days after Election Day, $1 billion to $2 billion will be borrowed from Social Security's disability benefits or health insurance funds, according to agency officials. They said the exact amount would not be determined until the day of the loan.

Corporations are scrambling back into the bond market. Many of them are seeking to shore up their financial positions and pay for past acquisiton sprees by issuing medium- and long-term debt securities, now that they can do so at reduced interest rates. Some companies waited months before going to market during the last two weeks to take advantage of the general decline in yields. In doing so, they were helped by shelf registration, a procedure that became available early this year. It lets a company obtain approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue debt certificates to the public and then wait until a financially propitious moment before offering them for sale.

It was shortly before 5 in the afternoon and Janice Bowman, a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, was walking south on Park Avenue toward her apartment in the East 80's. Ahead of her she noticed three teen-agers leaning against the wall of the Hunter College Elementary School, between 94th and 95th Streets, and her first instinct was to cross the street, to the east side. But she was ''just too tired,'' she recalled. As she came upon the youths, one of them grabbed the gold chain around her neck - the chain and cross her parents had given her as a child - and snapped it loose. The teen-agers ran off, chased by plainclothes police officers who had been watching them for some time. Miss Bowman, uninjured but enraged and feeling the ''sense of menace'' that some of her foreign friends had detected in New York, stood alone on the pavement, yelling ''thief.''