What was going on when I was born?

Governor Cuomo promised New Yorkers yesterday that they would get what they voted for in the $1.25 billion bond issue to finance roads and bridges throughout the state for the next five years. ''I think it gives us the unique opportunity not only to rebuild New York but to enhance our own credibility,'' the Governor said at a post-election news conference. ''We have a chance to prove to the people who had doubts we were telling the truth.'' With 99 percent of the results counted, the vote for the bond issue was 1,645,124, or 53 percent, and against it, 1,475,814, or 47 percent.

In theory, it seemed simple enough: The Aetna insurance company wanted to consolidate some of its offices in Hartford and move them to a new site here. But simple it was not. The project has become one of the largest corporate moves of its kind, involving the eventual shifting of more than 4,000 employees, the hiring of 1,000 more and the building of a 1.4 million-square-foot complex. At least temporarily, the move, which began last month and will take a year to complete, will cut Aetna's work force in the immediate Hartford area by more than a quarter.

The Consumers Power Company, which has been building a two-unit nuclear power plant in Midland, Mich., said yesterday that the completion of one unit may be delayed for more than a year and the construction schedule for a second would be revised. Part of the delay was attributed to the cancellation by the Dow Chemical Company last July of plans to buy steam produced at one of the units. The utility, which supplies gas and electricity in much of Michigan outside of Detroit, said Unit No. 2, to have been completed by February 1985, might now be delayed until mid- 1986. It said that completion of Unit No. 1, scheduled for August 1985, was now ''under review.''

After almost daily declines over the past month, stock prices rose sharply yesterday, reacting in part to a drop in interest rates. The Dow Jones industrial average, which was in the plus column throughout the session, rose 17.58 points, to 1,232.52, its biggest daily since Oct. 6, when it soared 18.60 points. Since closing at a record 1,284.65 on Oct. 10, the average had tumbled more than 60 points. The advance was broadly based, with stocks gaining in price on the New York Stock Exchange outscoring losers by a 5-to-3 ratio. Turnover climbed to 83.1 million shares, from 64.9 million on Tuesday, when volume was slowed because of Election Day.

Backers of Yasir Arafat repelled a three-pronged attack by Syrian- backed Palestinians on the loyalists' last stronghold in Lebanon. Lebanese leaders and Arab diplomats pressed efforts to arrange a cease-fire, apparently to get Mr. Arafat and his backers away from the densely-populated city of Tripoli, but there was no sign that any agreement had been reached. (Page A1, Column 6.) Washington urged Mideast nations to halt the fighting between rival Palestininan factions around Tripoli. The State Department said the United States was contributing $1 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross for relief work in the port city. (A1:5.)

The interrelated problems of trade and the value of the yen relative to the dollar are expected to be two of the dominant topics during President Reagan's discussions this week in Japan with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. No solutions are expected as a result of these talks, but the fact that they are on the agenda is viewed as a positive sign by business executives and economists in the United States. The following questions and answers explain the problems, how they arose and what, if anything, can be done about them. Q. Why are trade with Japan and the value of the yen so important to the United States?

The International Business Machines Corporation is moving 1,500 employees into 25 floors of this city's newest high-rise office building, the 45-story south tower of Crocker Center. Little more than a mile away, bulldozers are preparing the site for a 42- story office tower, part of the 7.9-acre Citicorp Plaza that the world's largest bank holding company expects to occupy early in 1986. Los Angeles, a sprawl of a city that only in the late 1960's began developing a true, high-rise, downtown central business district, is in the midst of a surge of office construction. At least 8 million square feet of new office space is planned by 1988, the largest five-year growth ever.

''WEIGHTLESS'' is the word Geoffrey Beene uses most frequently to describe his apparently airborne clothes. For his spring collection, introduced Tuesday afternoon at the Manhattan Flower Works, this most contemporary designer made clothes that seemed to defy gravity. In fact, they looked as if they required the occasional bands of quilting - lightweight, of course - or silvery binding just to keep them earthbound. He presented an astonishingly lovely collection that carried no echoes of fashion's past triumphs. The only echoes were of his own discoveries. Mr. Beene has worked out his own fashion language, extending the vocabulary each season. Each collection represents a voyage of discovery into the future.

An article in Business Day Tuesday about the bankruptcy filing of the Terex Corporation misstated the amounts of loans that the General Motors Corporation agreed to forgive IBH Holding A.G. They were 100 million West German marks in 1982 and 120 million marks in 1983.

Supporters of Yasir Arafat today beat back attacks by Syrian- backed Palestinians on three sides of his last stronghold outside this northern city. Efforts to arrange a cease-fire were under way in Damascus, Syria, both by Tripoli politicians and by an Arab diplomatic delegation. Its sole purpose, officials said, appeared to be to get Mr. Arafat and his men out of this area. The Arab diplomats, including the delegates of Persian Gulf nations, appeared confident that the Palestinian factions had agreed to stop fighting today, but there was no sign of a truce as the day went on. As a result, six Persian Gulf leaders ended a meeting without achieving the cease-fire they had sought. (Page A12.)

A top Nicaraguan rebel leader appealed to Americans yesterday to aid his forces while warning the Reagan Administration against direct military intervention in Nicaragua. In an interview in Manhattan at the start of a two-week fund-raising tour of the United States, Eden Pastora Gomez, head of the Nicaraguan Democratic Revolutionary Alliance, said: ''Military intervention in Nicaragua would be the biggest mistake that Reagan could make. In Grenada you got in and out quickly. In Nicaragua you could get in, but getting out would be another matter.''

THE bicycle that Marcel Breuer bought when he was teaching at the Bauhaus in the 1920's proved to be not only transportation for the architect but also the inspiration for the tubular steel furniture he designed from 1925 to 1928. A friend remarked to Breuer that in bicycle factories, ''they bend those steel tubes like macaroni.'' The comment became the idea behind the chairs. The tube-bending process that was already old when Breuer started to design tubular furniture is still the basis for making it today - it remains one of the most direct methods for shaping furniture out of raw material. But the tube bender used at Knoll International, which makes the authorized Breuer chairs, shares the floor with many other, much more sophisticated machines. Today a chair like Breuer's Cesca armchair, despite its high-tech appearance, is almost an industrial primitive. The appearance of a chair like the Cesca may continue to embody the production ideas that originally inspired it, but the circumstances of its manufacture have changed widely during its lifetime of production. While one of Breuer's tubular chairs was once sold in Weimar, Germany, for the price of a pair of shoes, the list price on the Cesca is now $625.