What was going on when I was born?

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company said yesterday that it plans to raise up to $1 billion in the near future through a new offering of common stock, its second equity offering of that size in the past 18 months. The company raised $1 billion in June 1981 through a public stock offering that remains the largest in history. The company said yesterday that it would disclose how many shares the new issue would entail when it filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bell's offering in June 1981 involved 18.15 million shares. At yesterday's closing stock price of $61.725, it would have to issue 16.2 million shares to realize $1 billion.

France decided today to ask private investors to finance more than half of the large industrial investment programs it wants the 11 major companies it nationalized earlier this year to start in 1983. The Cabinet, hoping to revive the stagnant French economy, agreed that state-owned companies competing with private industry will get a total of about $4 billion in new funds next year, nearly twice what they are expected to get from the Government this year. Brokers and bankers cautioned tonight that it was too early to judge whether the private capital markets would be prepared to lend the necessary funds because the Socialist Government had not decided on the precise terms under which the new financing would be sought. However, the Government bonds issued to compensate shareholders in the nationalized companies were well received on the Paris Stock Exchange because of the highly atttractive yield they carried.

A key member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party has told a group of Japanese journalists that talks with China could result in a pullback of troops from the Soviet-Chinese border. Participants in a conference of Japanese and Soviet journalists being held here confirmed today that the Soviet official, Viktor G. Afanasyev, who is the editor of Pravda, the party newspaper, made the remark on Tuesday during a meeting at Pravda's offices. The suggestion was similar to one that a Chinese official was reported as having made to Western journalists in Peking during a background discussion last month after the resumption of Soviet-Chinese negotiations. Efforts at an Accommodation Kyodo, the Japanese news agency, quoted Mr. Afanasyev as having said: ''It is possible that the two sides might promise each other a reduction of military forces in border areas.'' A reporter for the agency later said the quotation was accurate. (Although the United States has deliberately not been voicing public concern about the improvement of Soviet-Chinese relations, Washington officials say privately that they find the trend worrisome. Page A7.)

Six persons, including four children and their pregnant mother, were killed here this morning in a fire in a three-story tenement that a judge had condemned because of extensive fire and safety violations. Neighbors said the mother, with her youngest child in her arms, had screamed for help from the third-story window but had refused to jump or to drop the child. They said smoke then engulfed her and she disappeared from view. Ossie Laurin, who operates the Econ-O-Wash laundry a few doors from where the fire occurred, said the woman, Myra Reeves, had called to him from the window during the fire.

''We will not spend what we do not have. We will not defer needed actions in the hope that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end.

The American Ambassador to the Soviet Union and the Kremlin's principal expert on American affairs engaged in a sharp debate today on the issue of Soviet-American trade, with the Ambassador telling an audience of Americans and Russians that the United States would not relent in its determination to link trade to ''our overall principal relationship.'' The Ambassador, Arthur A. Hartman, who spoke at the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade and Economic Council, also seemed to be rebuking American participants in the conference. Some of the 200 American business leaders here for the meeting have criticized the Administration's restrictions on trade with the Soviet Union. In his policy statement, Mr. Hartman said the Soviet military buildup and the Kremlin's record in Afghanistan and Poland and on human rights were part of the ''reality'' that dictated official American attitudes toward trade.

Two times in the last four months, protesters have slipped into the Electric Boat Shipyard here and, unchallenged, made their way to Trident nuclear submarines, inflicting thousands of dollars of damage to them. The incidents - the second of which came last weekend - have prompted Washington officials not only to demand greater security here, but also to re-examine protective measures at other shipyards and military installations around the country. In a statement issued after last weekend's incident, the Navy said it was ''vitally concerned about incidents of this nature, particularly when they could affect national security.'' It added, ''Vandalism of this type cannot be tolerated by General Dynamics or the Navy.''

With nearly a third of production lines idle, the nation's factories operated last month at their lowest levels of capacity since the Government began keeping records in 1948, the Federal Reserve reported today. Capacity utilization now stands at only 68.4 percent, below the 69 percent rate posted during March 1975, the final month of the 1973-75 recession. This latest piece of grim industrial news means not only that a major part of the economy continued to decline in October but also, according to some economists, that when recovery comes, many American factories may not be equipped to meet it. Another troubled sector, the construction industry, took some comfort from a report today showing that while October home starts were up only 1 percent from September, permits for future construction, spurred by lower interest rates, were up 17.7 percent. (Page D11.)

A Manhattan developer announced plans yesterday to build an 18-story office building in lower Manhattan that is designed to compete with suburban projects in rents and to accommodate companies using computers and other modern office technology. Robert V. Tishman, a managing partner of Tishman Speyer Properties, said his company had taken a 99-year lease from Trinity Church on the block bounded by King, West Houston, Hudson and Greenwich Streets for construction of a 900,000-square-foot building. This represents the first major land transaction in 50 years for Trinity Church, which has extensive holdings in lower Manhattan. Space in the office building, which is expected to be completed in mid-1984, will rent for less than $30 a square foot annually, Mr. Tishman said. Space in other new downtown buildings, he said, with no special features for users of modern technology, now goes for $35 to $40 a square foot.

Jan Morris is a well-known British writer of nonfiction, including ''Destinations,'' ''The Venetian Empire'' and ''Conundrum.'' EIFIONYDD, Wales IAM told that when the Chinese, who know everything, build a house, they consult the precepts of an ancient science, feng shui, which tells them exactly how, when and where the work must be done and so brings good fortune to the home forever. Living as I do in Wales, I had no such handy guide available when I converted the 18th-century stables of our former family house into a new residence for myself, but I built it rather in the feng shui spirit all the same, evolving my own golden qualities of space, form and allusion to govern its reconstruction. Trefan Morys is not at all a large house - two rooms up, two down, plus a fairly poky bathroom - nor is it in the least posh. It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon another in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. It has a stable door downstairs, and external stone steps lead to a heavy wooden granary door on the floor above.

The headline yesterday on a Washington dispatch about the United States' reassessment of its participation in an international organization incorrectly characterized the agency. The reference, to the International Atomic Energy Agency, should have read, ''World Atom Agency.''

Researchers said yesterday they believed they had discovered the cause of Lyme disease, an illness that became a disturbing medical mystery when it was first identified in Connecticut seven years ago. The researchers said they had isolated a bacterium in the skin of patients and had concluded that this previously suspected organism was the cause of the illness. Finding the bacterium in patients with Lyme disease, which often causes debilitating arthritis and sometimes meningitis, in a sense brings the researchers' detective work full circle: from victim, to a tick that carried the bacterium and transmitted it and now, finally, to finding that same bacterium in the victim. Dr. Bernard Ackerman, a dermatopathologist at New York University, said in an interview that he and his colleagues had found the bacterium, a type known as spirochete, in human skin specimens sent to them by Dr. Bernard Berger, a dermatologist from Southhamptom, L.I., who is affiliated with the university. The specimens were taken from a red skin lesion that is characteristic of Lyme disease.