What was going on when I was born?

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today that he was carrying ''some very interesting and reasonable positions'' to present to Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko when Soviet-United States arms control talks resume here on Monday. He did not specify, in a news conference aboard his plane on his way here, what those ''positions'' were. But some American officials said Mr. Shultz was given additional flexibility by President Reagan two days ago in discussing possible restraints on development of an antisatellite weapons system, something that Moscow seeks to halt. In his arrival statement this morning, Mr. Shultz said he had been sent here on ''a mission for peace,'' but he was deliberately cautious about predicting the outcome of the first important Soviet-American arms control exchange in 13 months.

The hand-painted sign over the cluttered cubicle read Computer Butik, forcing a French word into Hungarian. Inside, in a cramped space perhaps eight feet square, a salesman in his 20's was bobbing and weaving and trying to serve a dozen customers at once, amid wooden shelves bent under Dutch-built Philips computers, Casio keyboards from Japan and assorted calculators in crushed cardboard cartons. ''We improvise a lot,'' the salesman said, settling onto a crate in a small back room to explain to a visitor how the computer business works in this Eastern European country. ''My boss, the owner, went down a list of state-owned companies, things like farms and factories, until he came up with the seed money he needed to get started,'' he said. ''We rent the booth from the department store, and we get the equipment anywhere we can, sometimes from local manufacturers, sometimes from people who bring it back from trips to the West.''

W. Wilson Goode likes to describe Philadelphia as ''a city on the move,'' an expression that many people here would also apply to the outgoing, perpetually busy man who has now served a year as Mayor. For both Mayor Goode and the city he leads, it was a year of highly visible successes and few setbacks, a year in which so many people found his enthusiasm for his job infectious and in which comment from the press here was so favorable that one critic complains he is being ''deified.'' Such criticism as the Mayor has encountered has been muted, generally involving suggestions that his assertions were overstated and he had been too quick to compromise. Sometimes the drama of setbacks has worked in his favor. A sequence of events last month could hardly have been improved if he had written a script himself. On a single day, Dec. 15, he emerged successful in a struggle to resolve a transit crisis and in a fight to prevent the Eagles football team from moving to the Sun Belt.

Charts and tables summarize the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Page A9.

It is a place where, every week, New Yorkers recount tales of broken lights, invisible signs, mysterious diseases and miraculous coincidences - each story offered as proof that a motorist did not deserve a traffic ticket. It is a place where, each year, 1.5 million motorists go to settle summonses or to have their day in court, and where drivers sometimes wait in line an hour just to ask what line to wait in. And as the lines grow longer and tempers grow shorter these days at the offices of the state's Traffic Violations Bureau, judges as well as drivers say it is fast becoming a place where legal gridlock seems to rule. ''This is like the Soviet Union!'' a driver screamed the other day after being found guilty of disregarding traffic markings at the Lincoln Tunnel. Administrative Judge Edward P. Collins also told him to pay the 12 unpaid fines he had received since 1980.

New orders, production and employment fell in December, from November, according to a survey of industrial purchasing managers that painted a more dismal picture of the economy and its future course than other recent economic reports. The Commerce Department, for example, said last Thursday that new orders to factories for manufactured goods in November rose a strong 4.3 percent, and economists said the report foreshadowed a pickup in production in the first part of this year. In addition, economists expect the Federal Reserve to report a rise in overall industrial production for December in response to increases in sales and a strong pace of auto assemblies. Lack of Consensus Many economists had suggested that the economy had shaken off a slowdown that set in last summer. But the report by the purchasing managers, compiled by the National Association of Purchasing Management for publication today, destroyed any consensus.

MONDAY, JANUARY 7, 1985 International The U.S. will offer the Soviet Union ''some very interesting and reasonable positions,'' Secretary of State George P. Shultz said, when the Soviet-American arms control talks resume in Geneva today. He was not any more specific in a news conference on his plane taking him to Geneva, but some American officials said President Reagan had given him additional flexibility in his discussion with Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko of possible restraints on the development of an antisatellite weapons system - something that Moscow attaches importance to halting. (Page A1, Column 6.) Mr. Shultz has sprung back from policy disappointments, notably the withdrawal of the American marines from Lebanon nearly a year ago and the failure of his mediation between Israel and the Lebanese Government on an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. He has found new purpose and prominence as the point man for a major Administration foreign policy initiative: the effort to revive arms negotiations with Moscow. (A8:1.)

The shooting took place on a New York City subway, but what Bernhard Hugo Goetz did on Dec. 22 after he was harassed by four teen- agers has become something greater than a local phenomenon. Many people - from Chicago to Hawaii to Canada - have responded passionately and vehemently to an event that seems to have embodied their fears and frustrations about crime in their own cities. While public officials like Mayor Koch and Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward have cautioned that ''vigilantism will not be tolerated in this city,'' citizens have responded with overwhelming appreciation for the anger that apparently motivated Mr. Goetz to shoot the youths and have been using radio and television call-in shows as vehicles to express their opinions. The hosts and producers of many of the shows said the case had taken on a status beyond the facts. People seem less concerned with the exact events, they said, than with the concept that someone somewhere had chosen to fight back.

The Economy The economy stumbled in December, according to a survey of purchasing managers. The survey, which was decidedly less optimistic than other recent Government reports, cited declines in new orders, production and employment. (Page D1.)

The head of a Government commission investigating official corruption was shot to death early today, and President Jose Napoleon Duarte said followers of a far-right party were responsible. Two men were killed, including one of the reported assailants, and another man was seriously wounded in what was described as a fierce shootout and car chase after the slaying. The slain Government investigator, Pedro Rene Yanes, was the head of the Presidential Commission on Ethics, established last year by Mr. Duarte to look into official corruption under previous governments that were controlled by conservative parties. Government officials said Mr. Yanes had found many cases of wrongdoing.

Chocolate mousse has been joined by strawberry, lemon and blueberry, on a menu that features hair products, not desserts. This type of mousse - a hair-care product with the consistency of whipped cream - not only keeps stray strands in place, but can also keep hair literally standing on end. Analysts call it the hottest new product in the $2.5 billion hair-care industry in 25 years. Sales for 1984 were in the $250 million range in the United States alone.

Farmers in the Central Valley of California are facing a cruel irony: the irrigation water that transformed a desert into the nation's most bountiful agricultural area is now threatening to make much of it worthless again. ''There's already some areas of the valley where you can't grow anything,'' said John Pucheu, who farms 2,300 acres near the hamlet of Tranquillity, 30 miles west of here. The reason: irrigation water has picked up salt and other chemicals from the soil, and there is no natural outlet from the valley for the tainted water. A hard layer of clay concentrates the polluted water near the surface, making the soil infertile.