What was going on when I was born?

The White House released sheafs of information today from President Reagan's 1980 campaign files indicating that Reagan advisers had repeated, secret access to strategy material prepared for President Carter, including debating tactics and other campaign plans. President Reagan said tonight at his news conference that he ''never saw anything of the kind'' in the campaign. ''It seems strange to me that, since I was the debater, no one on our side ever mentioned to me anything of this kind,'' he said, suggesting the materials might have come from a ''disgruntled worker in the Carter campaign.'' He indicated that the Democrats were now pursuing ''political'' motives in demanding an investigation of how his campaign aides obtained the material. A Battery of Questions The President answered a battery of questions about the surreptitious use of the Carter material in his 18th formal Presidential news conference. He also said, with a broad smile, that he found ''profound wisdom'' in the observation of House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. that even without the secret material Mr. Reagan would have defeated President Carter.

A New York State agency has dropped its requirement that a group of landmark Harlem brownstones be renovated to restore and preserve their interiors. The agency said there was nothing left to preserve. The decision will permit the city to proceed with a more than fouryear-old plan to repair the 12 buildings and sell them to neighborhood residents.

An article in Metropolitan Report on Saturday about the shooting of three students near Yeshiva University misidentified a Jewish organization and its role in offering a reward. It is the American Jewish Committee, which has pledged to raise $10,000 in reward money.

An article in Metropolitan Report on Saturday about New York City's Financial Control Board misidentified Thomas P. Puccio. He is no longer a member of the law firm of Booth, Lipton & Lipton.

BACK in 1976 New York City went dry, figuratively speaking, as far as local brews were concerned. That's when the F & M Schaefer Brewing Company capped its last keg of beer in New York and joined such late and lamented local breweries as Ebling, Koster & Bial, Trommer's, Ringler, Henry Elias, Jetter and John Eichler. At 32, Matthew Reich is too young to have tasted most of those oldtime brews produced by German, Scottish and Irish immigrants, but he's nostalgic nonetheless. With a little luck, he says, he will revive the grand tradition and bring back local beer to a city that once boasted 121 breweries. ''People should drink locally brewed beer, it's a simple as that,'' Mr. Reich said, sitting in a cramped, stuffy office above a former chicken warehouse near the Hudson River in Greenwich Village.

Two fundamental changes seem to be lending urgency to the North American debate about acid rain. One is that falling acids and the toxic metals associated with them are increasingly seen by scientists and public officials as a threat to people, not just to fish and forests. The other is that there are multiple signs in Washington that the question is no longer whether government should act, but rather what it should do. The Reagan Administration's position has been that not enough is known about the source of acid rain to justify an expensive program of controls on power plants and other industries. Many scientists believe it is the sulfur dioxides and nitrous oxides emitted from the tall stacks of coal-burning plants, often carried long distances by the wind, that fall as acid rain and snow or in a dry state, and, at high levels, form the acid-laden clouds and mists that bathe the mountain forests.