What was going on when I was born?

The Delaware River Basin Commission today declared a drought emergency in parts of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The declaration, the first the Basin Commission has made since 1981, will mean a ban on nonessential uses of water similar to those already in effect in New York City, Westchester County, eastern Pennsylvania and 93 communities in northeastern New Jersey. The largest new area to be restricted is western New Jersey, covering a third of the state, from the New York border to Cape May at the southern tip. The other newly restricted areas are the Catskills region of New York and the northern half of Delaware. Delaware had been under a drought warning, which called for a voluntary, rather than mandatory, ban on such nonessential uses of water as washing cars, watering lawns and cleaning sidewalks.

Not too many years ago, a small start-up computer company with only $70,000 in seed money stunned competitors with an inexpensive, versatile machine that introduced computers to thousands of new users. But the company was not Apple, the place was not Silicon Valley, and the product was not the personal computer. Instead, the place was a suburb of Boston nearly 30 years ago, the runaway success was the minicomputer - a smaller, simpler, more economical machine than the expensive mainframes - and many thought that bigger, lumbering competitors would never catch up with the Digital Equipment Corporation. They were wrong. Now, after a painful four years in which Digital saw profit margins shrivel and the personal computer revolution largely pass it by, the world's second-largest computer maker is attempting a powerful comeback. One of the most important pieces of its strategy will fall into place Tuesday, when the company introduces its Microvax II, a computer that puts one of Digital's most successful minicomputers on a chip.

LAST year at this time, Carlos R. Caraballo was a senior at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, where he was one of the most adept students at auto mechanics, especially chassis work. Today, even though he has graduated, Mr. Caraballo is still at Automotive High, but now he is an assistant teacher and shows others how to do such tasks as repair a front-end suspension or reline a set of brakes. Mr. Caraballo, who at the age of 18 is younger than some of his students, is participating in one of the country's most unusual ventures for producing new schoolteachers, the Substitute Vocational Assistance Program that has been mounted by the New York City Board of Education. The program is seen as a possible national model for coping with the teacher shortage that is starting to develop. Vocational education is a particularly critical area because skilled trades people can earn much higher salaries in industry than in the schools.

TUESDAY, MAY 14, 1985 International Sikhs plotted to kill Rajiv Gandhi during the Indian Prime Minister's visit to the United States next month, according to the F.B.I. William H. Webster, director of the bureau, said that F.B.I. agents had foiled a plan to ''train a group of Sikhs in the use of firearms and explosives'' to carry out ''guerrilla-type operations'' against Indian leaders. [Page A1, Cols. 2-4.] A strike protesting Sikh attacks in northern India last weekend closed markets and businesses throughout New Delhi. Sporadic violence was reported as shopkeepers closed their doors to protest what the opposition called the Government's failure to prevent Sikh terrorism. [A11:1-4.]

BY merely buying flower bulbs for their gardens, botanists warn, some Americans have unwittingly abetted the trade in endangered species. Conservation-minded consumers who would not dream of buying cheetah pelts or parrots may instead be depleting rare plants by planting cyclamens, snowdrops and anemones that were uprooted from fields in western Asia. A decade ago, when the international treaty governing trade in endangered species came into force, threatened animals received priority attention. Now scientists are shifting their sights to what many say is the equally worrisome commerce in endangered plants.

When Michael Jackson pulsed down the stairs to make his now-historic Pepsi commercial and his hair caught fire from a flying spark, Mr. Jackson and Pepsico Inc. reaped enormous publicity. For Pepsi, the stakes were high. Never before had a large corporation put such a substantial investment in the sponsorship of a well-known performer. By signing the Jackson brothers for a record $5.5 million commercial and concert tour package, Pepsico pushed corporate sponsorship of musical superstars to a new level.

IF the high hopes of five years ago had been realized, today might have seen the 37th launching of a space shuttle. Everyone in the program, the engineers and managers and their political overseers, would have been congratulating one another on how well the fleet of four re-usable spaceships was fulfilling the promise of providing a revolutionary means of dependable, frequent and economical access to space. Such was the optimism in December 1980 when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued its ambitious timetable listing for May 14, 1985, the flight of shuttle 37 with a secret military payload. The first test flight was still four months away. Even so, NASA was boldly predicting 500 shuttle flights through 1991. Reality has fallen far short of those early expectations. A week ago, the Challenger returned from the 17th mission. It will be perhaps two years before the 37th mission takes off. At best, NASA now estimates, there will be only 165, not 500, shuttle missions through 1991.

In the way New Yorkers socialize and think about issues of equality, and in their housing, whites and blacks in the city remain deeply segregated, according to a New York Times/WCBS-TV poll. While most of the city's residents say they have good friends of other races at work, the line is drawn when they go home. Most say they live in neighborhoods inhabited completely or mostly by members of their own race. And more than half of the blacks and whites polled said they had not spent a social evening with anyone of the other race in the last few months. Moreover, half of the blacks and whites polled reported that people they know used racial slurs.

The number of New York City public school pupils reading as well or better than their counterparts around the nation has reached a new high, the Board of Education said yesterday. Preliminary results of an annual reading test showed that 56.8 percent of the pupils in grades 2 through 9 scored at or above the national median, compared with 52.8 percent last year. The same test has been administered in two alternating versions since 1978, when only 43 percent of the city's pupils were found to be reading at grade level. Every District Improves Every grade and every district in the city registered an improvement over last year's results, which showed a 2.7 percent drop from 1983 levels. Of the city's 32 school districts, 21 have recorded their highest levels since the city began administering the California Achievement Test eight years ago.

A new political reality has begun to sink in at the Pentagon: The biggest peacetime military buildup in modern American history is coming to an end, and the nation is asking whether it has been getting its money's worth. After four years and appropriations of more than $1,007,900,000,000 - that is, one trillion, seven billion, nine hundred million dollars - Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger says he has resigned himself to supporting a level of military spending he describes as ''maintenance.'' Both houses of Congress have, in effect, told him in recent days that he would fall considerably short of that because the popular mandate for higher military budgets has disappeared. Preparation Seen as Better The Senate voted early Friday not to let military spending increase in 1986 beyond the level of inflation, and members of the House Budget Committee say they plan to hold spending lower than that. As Congress prepares to take up authorization bills when its budget resolutions are complete, there are deep disagreements about what a doubling of the annual military budget has accomplished, about who is to blame for the evident collapse of popular support and about how to curb spending without undermining national security.

In a step that could lead to the first privately owned major airline in the nation, the board of directors of Frontier Airlines yesterday approved the sale of 25 of the carrier's planes to United Airlines for $265 million and held out the possibility of using the money to buy out shareholders. Joseph R. O'Gorman Jr., the president and chief executive of both the airline and its parent company, Frontier Holdings Inc., said in a statement after the board meeting in Denver that proceeds from the sale would be used to pay down debt, and that the board would consider using the balance ''to buy out Frontier's publicly held stock.'' The proposal suggested that management might join with the carrier's unions, which have already been seeking financing to buy out the company on their own, in taking Frontier private.

A year ago, senior Administration officials agreed unanimously to set up counterterrorist groups to take pre-emptive and punitive action. At the same time, intelligence operatives said the groups were unlikely to work and were likely to get the United States into trouble. There was no question about the seriousness of the problem of combating terrorism. And officials said the Administration was united on the need to do so by improving the collection of intelligence and warnings of planned terrorist actions. But there was doubt that any kind of covert action could be taken effectively, particularly in Lebanon.