What was going on when I was born?

When it opens a new boutique, Benetton is usually satisfied with a modest appearance - a bright green facade, say, and wooden clothing shelves propped against the walls. The overall effect is, to say the least, unprepossessing, as befits the fashion equivalent of fast food. But several years ago, when Benetton sought to open a boutique along Zurich's meticulous Bahnhofstrasse, the avenue's store owners and bankers objected that the design was below-standard. Benetton adapted, overcoming the resistance with ingenious window displays and elegant furnishings, and now the shop is among Benetton's most profitable.

Jim Wiley set his boning knife down and wiped his large hands on a blood- stained butcher's apron. Like many of his fellow storekeepers, he has been fuming for weeks over the arrival in town of a duty-free store. ''It's bigger than us,'' he said, standing behind the white enamel meat counter at Wiley Brothers Red and White, the market he runs here with his brother Harold. The duty-free store - really nothing more than a window in a stone wall - is squeezed into a corner of Gault's Bait Shop. ''Be Ready to Fish,'' reads the motto over the door of the bait shop, which sits near a dock here on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario where the car ferry from Wolfe Island in Canada chugs in a dozen times a day.

EXPERTS pursuing one of man's most audacious dreams - to create machines that think - have stumbled while taking what seemed to be an elementary first step. They have failed to master vision. After two decades of research, they have yet to teach machines the seemingly simple act of being able to recognize everyday objects and to distinguish one from another. Instead, they have developed a profound new respect for the sophistication of human sight and have scoured such fields as mathematics, physics, biology and psychology for clues to help them achieve the goal of machine vision. The result has been a burst of new ideas, techniques and ways of building computers that suggest the riddle may be soluble after all. Dozens of universities and corporations have embarked on the quest with renewed vigor, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, Xerox, General Motors, General Electric and International Business Machines.

''History demonstrates beyond controversy that just as the arms competition has its root in political suspicions and anxieties, so it can be channeled in more stabilizing directions and eventually be eliminated if those political suspicions and anxieties are addressed as well.'' - President Reagan. (A10:5.)

At 11:13 this morning, John S. R. Shad, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, inserted an eight-inch floppy disk into a computer terminal, sending 85 pages of corporate data speeding into the agency's public reference files and initiating the commission's long-awaited electronic filing and retrieval system. Mr. Shad, turning to an audience of about 50 officials and journalists, called the event a ''step through the looking glass into a future wonderland.'' After a year or so of testing, the agency will begin to make millions of pages of company disclosures instantly available to investors and analysts using computers. At first, however, the data will be accessible only on International Business Machines Corporation Personal Computers at the agency's public reference room here and in similar offices in New York and Chicago. Not until March 1986, or later, will investors sitting at home computers be able to look at the commission's electronic files.

The dollar swung widely in the foreign exchange markets yesterday, closing slightly lower, as West Germany's central bank again intervened, scaring off traders. However, the dollar finished the New York trading day above its lows hit earlier in Europe. Foreign exchange traders said that the market was nervous and trading thin, with many investors watching the action from the sidelines after suffering a setback on the intervention by Germany's Bundesbank Friday. The intervention reversed a three-week dollar rally and sent its value plummeting in chaotic trading.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. MANY experts believe that the key to improving education rests not with national commissions nor even with local school boards, but with the staff in each individual school building. Unless a school has good leadership, monitors pupil achievement and provides a safe and supportive atmosphere, they say, education is not likely to improve. In keeping with this theory, Florida is embarking on one of the country's first comprehensive programs to identify and reward ''merit schools.''

A Federal judge today rejected a charge that the New York State Police Academy discriminated against minority recruits in its 1981 class, in which black and Hispanic candidates dropped out at much higher rates than whites. The judge, James T. Foley, ruled in Federal District Court in Albany that there had been ''a complete failure'' on the part of the United States Justice Department to prove that the disparate graduation rates were the result of ''an atmosphere of racial discrimination.'' He said that testimony designed to show harassment of black and Hispanic officers could generally be explained or involved isolated incidents ''that were not tolerated or condoned.'' The Justice Department, which filed the suit, had sought back pay and reinstatement for recruits who had failed to complete the 1981 class and said they were harassed. Judge Foley denied the requests.

A brief in SportsMonday yesterday incorrectly identified the winner in the women's division of the Bronx Half Marathon Sunday. She was Lisa Chapman of the North Jersey Masters running club.

A hormone called relaxin that has been a puzzle to medical science for a half century now shows promise for several important uses, including aid to difficult pregnancy and birth, and may even hold a clue to the origin of the human species. ''There is a general feeling that relaxin is a hormone involved in the mechanics of parturition,'' said Dr. Hugh Niall of the Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine at the University of Melbourne in Australia. But he said the possibilities go far beyond that. While parturition, the actual process of giving birth, seems largely mechanical, the stage is set for it by a complex series of biochemical events. Scientists think relaxin may play an important role in that chemical orchestration of pregnancy.

-force winds buffet a backpacking researcher as he lugs 40-pound batteries to a box-shaped mechanism. At the World Trade Center in Manhattan, visitors on the 1,350-foot-high observation platform note a similar apparatus at one end of the platform. On an Alaskan mountain a researcher, armed with a rifle in case he meets an unfriendly bear, inspects an identical device nailed to the top of a tree. These instruments, used to collect water from clouds, are manifestations of the first large-scale scientific survey of the chemistry of cloud moisture, its effects on plants and its relationship to acid rain, which has been linked to the destruction of plant life and fish. The instruments are part of a newly installed network of collectors in 10 Northeastern and Northwestern sections of the United States, and have already identified a major air pollution event that occurred a few weeks ago in New York and New England, it was announced today by the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., which is conducting the study.

Democratic leaders accused President Reagan today of making light of the bombing last week of the United States Embassy in Lebanon, and Congressional committees pressed ahead with plans to investigate why security at the embassy had been breached. The Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., Democrat of Massachusetts, said it was ''ridiculous'' for the President to compare the incomplete security measures at the embassy to the typical delays in a kitchen remodeling job. Mr. O'Neill said it was a ''blatantly stupid alibi for the destruction of our embassy in Beirut.'' When Mr. Reagan was asked in New York on Sunday about delays in installing security devices at the embassy in a suburb of East Beirut, he said, ''Anyone that's ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.'' Mondale Assails Reagan Remark Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic Presidential candidate, assailed the remark on a campaign swing in Texarkana, Tex. ''That's the problem right there,'' Mr. Mondale said. ''Being President and countering terrorists is a much more difficult task than fixing up the kitchen.'' (Page A20.)