May 15, 1986

The Sperry Corporation yesterday rejected as inadequate the $70-a-share acquisition offer from the Burroughs Corporation and took certain unusual steps that, according to Wall Street sources, might ultimately result in Sperry's takeover but at a much higher price. In unanimously turning down Burroughs's buyout offer, Sperry's board said that if Burroughs purchased 33 million Sperry shares in its cash tender offer, Sperry would retaliate by tendering for the remaining 29.5 million shares at $80 a share in cash. Sperry's $80 self-tender would go forward, however, only if Burroughs was successful in its tender bid. In essence, Burroughs would have control of Sperry at the time of the retaliatory tender offer.

''I once told a friend from Berlin that if speed limits came to the Autobahn, it would not be the end of Porsche,'' said Peter W. Schutz, chief executive at Porsche A.G., the West German maker of expensive - and very fast - sports cars. ''I just told him we would build him the darndest car he could imagine, with a swimming pool, sauna and sports deck.'' The sleek, high-performance Porsche is in no danger of turning into such an ungainly creature, but the tongue-in-cheek remark is representative of the unsentimental marketing approach that Mr. Schutz brought to the faltering company five years ago. Setbacks in the 70's ''We are in the business of serving discriminating customers with a technological art work that is probably more entertainment than transportation,'' the 56-year-old Mr. Schutz said recently in his compact office at Porsche headquarters here. Porsche's competition, Mr. Schutz has said in the past, is not just other fancy cars, but also yachts and vacation homes.

LIBERATED by their computers and eager to increase the time they spend with their families, millions of Americans are finding that the most satisfying and productive work place is home. Most of the homeworkers are, as they always have been, individual entrepreneurs whose services require neither a storefront nor a factory. But they increasingly include business employees who forgo office camaraderie one or two days a week because they can get more done for their families and their offices by staying home. After conducting what appears to be the first nationally representative poll on the issue last winter, Electronic Services Unlimited, a New York-based research company, estimated that 13 million to 14 million people regularly work at home. In contrast to many previous estimates, the survey also reveals that, for several million of these homeworkers, the advent of the personal computer was what freed them from a regular office.

IN the 40 years that my apartment had been occupied by previous tenants, nobody had found it necessary to remove the paint drippings from the brass doorknobs. This told me something: none of them worked at home. Those were the kinds of things that made it impossible for me to meet a deadline. Who could work in such a disaster area? Not until I stank up the apartment with paint remover and scraped off every last dribble of dusty rose semigloss from the 20 knobs could I even think about working. Not until I'd replaced the plants killed by the fumes could I approach my desk. This isn't only my problem. Joseph Heller wrote ''Catch-22'' in seven years while holding down a full-time job. He knew if he had tried working at home, it would have taken him 22 years to write ''Catch-7.'' Michelangelo originally offered to do the Sistine paintings at home. The Vatican knew he'd goof off unless they schlepped him out of his house. ''Make it the ceilings and you've got a deal,'' he said.

''We realize that it is another sound of the tocsin, another grim warning that the nuclear era necessitates a new political thinking and a new policy.'' - Mikhail S. Gorbachev, on the Chernobyl nuclear accident. [ A10:3. ]