April 2, 1984

Stephen Wohl browsed at the personal computer show at Madison Square Garden, wandering past floppy-disk jigsaw puzzles, binary watches, core memory embedded in Lucite, a video tutorial on crap shooting, computer graphic greeting cards and a booth featuring a popular video game, ''Attack of the Mutant Camels.'' A fellow browser asked if Mr. Wohl was shopping for anything special. ''Yes,'' replied the Queens businessman. ''I'm looking for a 20-megabyte RAM with hard disks, a 68,000 CPU system, high-res graphics, at least 640 by 400 pixels, and tablet input. Preferably I want three-dimensional graphics with plotter output and a Unix operating system.''

Interest rates rose sharply in the first quarter, as the economy expanded briskly and many investors withdrew from the bond market, recalling that recent episodes of rapid growth have led to higher interest rates, lower bond prices and more inflation. Concern that the Federal Reserve was tightening monetary policy has aggravated the upturn in rates, but many analysts agreed that the fundamental upward movement of rates that they see continuing into 1985 is beyond the Fed's control. ''The person who will determine interest rates is the consumer, not Paul Volcker,'' said Richard B. Hoey, chief economist at A. G. Becker Paribas. Although he expects Mr. Volcker, the Federal Reserve Board's Chairman, to continue following an anti-inflationary monetary policy, Mr. Hoey said the central bank would continue to respond to economic developments, rather than actively leading interest rates up or down.

The three major candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination opened a joint appearance in Manhattan yesterday with pledges of mutual respect, but almost immediately fell back into their running feud over foreign policy and campaign tactics. Some of the sharpest differences emerged over the endorsements by Walter F. Mondale and Senator Gary Hart of a proposal to move the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In a one-hour appearance on a WNBC-TV news program broadcast in the metropolitan area, Mr. Mondale accused Mr. Hart of flip-flopping on the issue. The third candidate, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, accused both men of giving the embassy issue unwarranted importance. In an earlier television appearance yesterday, he said this amounted to a ''patronizing'' and ''pandering'' approach to Jewish voters.

A 43-year-old mystery - what happened to the reading copy of the famous speech that President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered to a joint session of Congress on Dec. 8, 1941 - has finally been solved. In the speech, Roosevelt called the previous day, when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, ''a date which will live in infamy'' and asked Congress to recognize that a state of war existed between Japan and the United States. But when he left the podium in the chamber of the House of Representatives, he left behind on the lectern his reading copy of the speech. When he returned to the White House, the President asked his son James, who was an aide, ''Where is the speech?'' His son replied, ''I don't know.''

Dr. N. John Hall spends two or three days a week in the Bronx and much of the rest of his time in the 19th century. As an English professor at Bronx Community College, Dr. Hall shows students how to identify sentence fragments and introduces them to such writers as Hemingway and Chekhov. In his research, he peruses Anthony Trollope's novels for precisely rendered glimpses of Victorian life. Dr. Hall's scholarship is the sort frequently associated with professors at research universities, but less often with those at two-year community colleges. Little in his research relates directly to his classes at the college, where a course on Trollope is considered too esoteric to offer.