What was going on when I was born?

The State Education Commissioner presented revised requirements yesterday for all high school students in New York State that call for an extra year of social studies, mathematics and science in order to graduate. The plan also would require three years of a foreign language for a Regents diploma, which is pursued by 45 percent of the graduates, almost all of whom are college-bound and must pass special examinations at the end of each course. The plan, developed under the direction of Education Commissioner Gordon M. Ambach, will be considered by the State Board of Regents today in Buffalo. The plan softens an earlier proposal that called for adding two years of mathematics and sciences to the requirements for a Regents diploma. The earlier plan was redraftedafter eight months of deliberations and hearings. In addition, the idea in the original plan of lengthening the school year by 10 instructional days has been abandoned.

David, the bright, cheerful boy who spent all but the last 15 days of his 12 years of life in a sterile plastic bubble, had a death "as amazing as his life," his doctor said today. Conscious, alert and making jokes to the last, David made his last gesture, a wink at his doctor before he slipped into a sedated sleep that ended at 8 P.M. Wednesday when Dr. William T. Shearer pronounced him dead. Doctors had suspected David was sickening from a bone marrow transplant intended to release him to a normal existence. But an autopsy showed no clear evidence that the transplant had instead hastened his death, hospital officials said, and doctors are still trying to determine what finally overwhelmed his defenseless body. Among the last things David said, Dr. Shearer reported at a news conference this morning, was a seeming acknowledgment that he was dying.

International Rebel units of the Lebanese Army reappeared on the streets of West Beirut under the control of Shiite and Druse militia leaders opposed to President Amin Gemayel. According to Western intelligence officials, about 40 percent of the 37,000-man Lebanese Army is either openly supporting the anti-Government Moslem militias or refusing to leave its barracks. Israeli planes bombed targets in the mountains east of Beirut in what the Israeli radio said was an attack on Palestinian guerrilla bses. It was the third Israeli air strike since Sunday.

Friday TRIBUTE TO PAUL JACOBS Nearly 30 colleagues of Paul Jacobs, the pianist who died last September, are gathering at Symphony Space, Broadway and 95th Street, tonigh at 8 for a concert in his memory. The performers will include James Levine, Gilbert Kalish, Ned Rorem and members of the New York Philharmonic, for which Mr. Jacobs was pianist and harpsichordist. He was also a teacher, lecturer and writer. This will be a marathon program, including works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Frescobaldi, Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. It's free. PARK AVE. JAZZ SERIES IS BACK

%TAn article in Business Day Wednesday about New York radio stations misstated the number of listeners toWKHK, now WLTW. There are about 800,000, according to Radio and Records, a trade publication.

The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed today that he had proposed making corporate executives liable for violations of the Federal securities laws, rather than corporations themselves. The proposal, made informally, has raised heated opposition from other members of the commission and from Congress. John S.R. Shad, the chairman, raised the issue in a memorandum last month to his fellow commissioners in which he argued that individuals and not their corporate employers should "have to incur litigation expenses, adverse publicity and the opprobia of past miscreants' misdeeds." As presented in the Shad memorandum, discussed by all three S.E.C. commissioners today at a House Commerce subcommittee hearing, it appears that Mr. Shad was talking only of Commission enforcement practices, not a change in law on the statute books.

Congress's tax-writing committees took initial steps today toward drafting a deficit-reducing package for the next three years. Meanwhile, bipartisan negotiators from Congress and the Reagan Administration had a more productive second meeting than expected, according to some of the Republican participants, on President Reagan's $100 billion deficit "down payment." The had met first on Feb. 8. The Senate Finance Committee, by a vote of 15 to 4, approved a $100 billion goal for tax increases and spending reductions over three years, with the condition that $50 billion in tax increases would be matched by $50 billion in spending cuts.

Doris Cooper Baxter, who is known to her friends as Daiquiri, got her dream job as a United Airlines stewardess in July 1967. "I loved United, I loved doing things for people and I loved flying," said Mrs. Baxter, a resident of Greensboro, N.C., who now runs a business called Designs by Daiquiri. She only flew for a year, though, because United had a rule that its stewardesses had to remain single, and in September 1968, she got married. Now - 16 years, two children and many jobs later - Mrs. Baxter wants to fly again. And like 1,800 other former United flight attendants who left their jobs between July 29, 1965, and Nov. 7, 1968, when the no-marriage rule was changed, she stands a good chance of winning reinstatement.

The Gulf Oil Corporation has offered to pay $70 a share, or $1.52 billion, to buy back the 13.2 percent stake in the company held by T. Boone Pickens and a group of investors trying to take over the company, Mr. Pickens told the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. A repot, filed with Government agency as part of an offer made by the Pickens investor group to pay $65 a share for an additional 8.2 percent of Gulf's stock, said the proposal came directly from James E. Lee, chairman of Gulf, on Feb. 17 to an unidentified member of the group. That M. Harbert 3d, a Birmingham, Ala., businessman. He told Mr. Lee the group was not interested.

On the site of a defunct copper smelter in this bustling industrial city just 30 miles southwest of midtown Manhattan stands one of the nation's most successful steel mills. Since it opened in mid-1980, the mill, run by the Raritan River Steel Company, has been so successful that it now produces almost 20 perent of the nation's wire rod, which comes in six-mile-long, quarter-inch-diameter coils that are processed to be used in items ranging from chain link fences and coat hangers. Indeed, the mill has done so well that its production has displaced some low-cost imports and helped force the United States Steel Corporation, the nation's largest steelmaker to close several wire rod mills. A Growing Breed The Raritan River mill, which earned several million dollars in 1983 while the overall steel industry lost almost $3 billion, is one of the most ambitious and technologically advanced of a new and growing breed of steel mills - the mini-mill.

TWO HUNDRED years ago, on Washington's birthday, the 360-ton Empress of China sailed from Lower Manhattan for Canton, and thus became the first ship from the United States to trade with China. The bicentenial is being marked this weekend by exhibitions of the exotic wares brought back in the trade with the Orient at four New York museums and an auction gallery. The Empress, which returned to New York 15 months later, was the first of dozens of American ships that would traverse the same 32,000-nautical-mile route over the next century. Tea, a commodity as important to the economy of the world of that era as oil is today, was the aim of seafaring merchants. The less perishable goods that became far more valuable in time-silks, crockery, furnishings and paintings-were brought back as ballast in the holds of the Empress and the vessels that followed. By 1790, the United States was second only to Britain in trade with Canton, and 10 years later one-third of all ships arriving there were American. Great fortunes were made in the China trade, including John Jacob Astor's, whose wealth came in good part from selling furs to China. Some Chinese enterpreneurs were enormously successful as well among them the merchant Houqua, who left a fortune of about $26 million at his death in 1836.

An Associated Press dispatch yesterday on a Federal court order to restore disability benefits to some former Social Security recipients erred on the number of people affected. The ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, applies to 34,000 people in the circuit's nine Western states.