What was going on when I was born?

Rockefeller Center, perhaps the nation's best-known office complex, is moving to offer its thousands of business tenants a new service. By this time next year, if things go as planned, companies will be able to buy their basic telephone service not from the New York Telephone Company, but from Rockefeller Center itself. Joining an increasing number of property managers in Manhattan and around the country, Rockefeller Center will provide a centralized telephone switchboard in each of its buildings - in much the same way it already provides such shared services as elevators, heating and air-conditioning. Installing such a switchboard will enable the buildings to get by with far fewer local telephone lines than they normally require, thus allowing tenants to save on their monthly bills. ''From the customer's view, Rockefeller Center will be the telephone company,'' said Jerome G. Lucas, president of Telestrategies Inc., a McLean, Va., communications consulting company.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl met today with his Interior Minister about what intelligence experts are calling one of the worst spy scandals in West German history. As they conferred, the leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party, Hans-Jochen Vogel, said the Interior Minister, Friedrich Zimmermann, bore ''political responsibility for the greatest endangering of security in the Federal Republic's history.'' Mr. Kohl's spokesman told a news conference that after a Cabinet meeting Tuesday the Chancellor would have a second report on the spreading espionage affair and then draw the appropriate ''personnel consequences'' - an allusion to an anticipated shake-up in the country's intelligence establishment. Parliamentary Hearing Set Mr. Vogel, suggesting that his party would seek the Interior Minister's resignation, warned that ''the scandal can in no way be cleaned up by measures against individual functionaries.'' In coming debates, the Social Democrats are certain to recall that two of their senior figures had resigned because of espionage imbroglios - Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1974 and Defense Minister Georg Leber in 1978.

Unlike the United States, where Congress cut off funding for synthetic fuels development on July 31, Canada is pressing cautiously ahead with a number of efforts to develop its substantial oil-sands resources, potentially one of the largest synthetic fuel endeavors anywhere. ''It is our ace in the hole,'' explained John Zaozirny, energy minister of Alberta, the province that has most of Canada's 1,000 billion barrels of oil in known oil-sands reserves. Some of the oil from those reserves is sold as is, but most that is extracted now is synthesized into a lighter, more conventional crude. Mr. Zaozirny and industry officials say that even with today's eroding oil prices, many oil-sands developments, with their low cost and enormous resources, make economic sense -much more than coal gasification and oil-shale development make in the United States. With considerable governmental help still available on both the Federal and provincial level, they make even more.

Companies T. Boone Pickens said he would reshape his Mesa Petroleum into a limited partnership. The company is caught with the rest of the industry in a declining oil market, and Mr. Pickens said he thought the tactic was the best way to ''maximize values to shareholders.'' Wall Street analysts saw the move as exceptionally good news for Mesa stockholders. [Page D1.] Revlon's directors approved an offer to repurchase up to 10 million of the company's shares for new notes and preferred stock valued at $57.50 a share. The offer, made as part of the company's fight against a takeover bid by Pantry Pride, represents a substantial premium over the current share price. [D1.]

Two of Brazil's senior finance officials resigned today in the first Government shake-up since civilian rule returned to the country last March. The Finance Minister and the central bank president both stepped down after their repeated calls for tighter economic austerity had gone unheeded by President Jose Sarney. Finance Minister Francisco Dornelles quit just three days after his deputy, Sebastiao Marcos Vital, was abruptly dismissed by Mr. Sarney for criticizing the Government's current expansionist economic policy.

Directors of Revlon Inc., fighting a takeover bid by Pantry Pride Inc., yesterday approved an offer to repurchase up to 10 million shares of its common stock for new notes and preferred stock valued at $57.50 a share. The Revlon board noted that this exchange offer would represent ''a substantial premium over recent share prices.'' The announcement came after the close of trading and following a two-hour meeting of directors. Revlon's stock rose 12.5 cents, to $46.375, yesterday.

IN Kansas, back in 1958, two young brothers attending Wichita State University opened the first fast-food Pizza Hut and met with enormous success: They eventually managed to sell enough pizzas, mushrooms and pepperoni to become a $1.8 billion-a-year franchise operation, with outlets situated throughout the United States as well as in Hong Kong, Kuwait, Britain and Spain. Today, the original Pizza Hut has been moved to a prominent spot at Wichita State University, where the hutlike, red-brick building stands as a symbol of successful entrepreneurship. And should any students aspire to the sort of entrepreneurial savvy that Pizza Hut represents, a new curriculum of business courses is offered to lead the way. At Wichita State and at colleges and business schools across the country, entrepreneurship has increasingly become a prominent academic discipline. According to the National Federation of Independent Business in Washington, only 10 universities offered courses in entrepreneurship in 1967. Today 340 schools offer courses, and in some instances majors in the field.

The Administration's emerging new trade strategy, defusing protectionism at home by putting pressure on foreign governments to open their markets, turns on a provision of United States trade law that permits the Government itself to file an unfair-trade complaint. The President's reported decision against imposing shoe import quotas was linked by White house officials to a commitment to invoke Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 in a campaign to induce foreign countries to accept more American-made goods. Administration and Congressional officials said the Cabinet was now weighing the ''self-initiation'' of unfair-trade complaints against Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, among other nations. Such complaints are filed with the United States trade representative, who is appointed by the President. In cases of this kind he makes his recommendations to the President.

WORKING round the clock under an Illinois prairie, physicists are preparing to switch on the world's largest factory for the production of antimatter, the rare and baffling particles that exist as shadowy mirror-images of all the subatomic particles in the universe. When the work is completed next month, speeding antiprotons will be injected into a 4-mile circular atom smasher and slammed into counter-rotating beams of protons, producing a flash of energy that will give physicists their most penetrating look yet into the heart of the atom. Not just a scientific tool, the new antimatter collider at the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., is seen as a triumph of American science, much more powerful than the atom smashers of European rivals. This is especially savored by researchers in the United States because two Europeans - Dr. Carlo Rubbia and Dr. Simon van der Meer of the Geneva-based European Laboratory for Particle Physics - last year won the Nobel Prize for their design of an antimatter collider and their discoveries with it. Still, the new $38 million factory at Fermilab is exciting particle physicists around the world. Large-scale antimatter production is viewed as a critical step toward realizing dreams of rocket engines for interstellar travel, efficient energy production on vast scales, bold new medical therapies - as well as devastating new bombs.

Psychologists are drawing a picture of the emotional support offered by friends and family that affirms its value but points up the resentment and harm that well-meaning gestures can foster. ''The irony is that sometimes we are least able to help the people we care about most,'' said James Coyne, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. This complex view of emotional support, a subject that has moved to the fore in behavioral research only in recent years, was reported here over the weekend at the meeting of the American Psychological Association. For example, in a study of people whose spouses or children had died in traffic accidents, the bereaved people reported being made upset or angry by many of the things said to them by well-intentioned friends and family members. Other research has examined emotional support in a variety of situations, including the stress brought on by serious illness, the death of someone close, the loss of a job or the depredations of aging.

ON the night before Christmas in 1492, the flagship of Christopher Columbus, the Santa Maria, ran aground on a reef off the North Coast of Hispaniola and was wrecked beyond repair. Accepting the hospitality of an Arawak chief, the men stripped timbers from the abandoned ship and erected a fortified settlement at an Indian town. Columbus named the place La Navidad. Leaving 39 men there with instructions to trade for gold, Columbus sailed back to Spain on the Nina. He returned 11 months later to find a scene of desolation. Both the European settlement and the surrounding Indian village had been burned. All of his men were dead. Columbus sailed on, and La Navidad dropped out of sight. The location and fate of this first European settlement in the New World - the point of first extended contact between European and New World cultures - have mystified scholars ever since.

T. Boone Pickens, the chairman of the Mesa Petroleum Company, saying that he was temporarily out of the takeover business, announced a major reorganization of the company yesterday. He said he would reshape the organization into a limited partnership to ''maximize values to shareholders.'' The company, caught in a declining oil market with the rest of the industry, would go out of existence in 1987 and the business would continue under the name Mesa Limited Partnership. That would begin this December with the initial distribution of partnership units to shareholders.