To stay current as Historian (is this perhaps a subtle "non-sequitur"?), I occasionally pick up a copy of one of the early issues of the Transactions and browse through it, trying to recreate in my mind the "zeitgeist" of that era as a first step in creating historical perspective and in juxtaposing it to today's beat.
As an example of this nostalgic, but educational, process, I am proposing that you joint me in perusing the March 1968 issue. Why did I pick this particular issue? Well, for one thing it is my first personal copy that I received after becoming a student member of IEEE. I still remember the reverence with which I used to hold it at that time. Here was the ultimate source of new research on Information Theory. It looked so formal, so authoritative, so powerful! And it had (already) that high-quality, glossy, uncompromisingly noble look.
As I was flipping the pages, I realized that the feeling of reverence was still there. After the first hurried stokes through the issue, I started slowing down, focusing on some unnoted details, the names of the people (some of who were unknown to me then but are now my friends, others who were unknown then and who still have retained the mystery and aura of the unknown), the topics they wrote about (some still in the active plowing area of the field, others lying quietly in the set layers of problems that are either resolved or not mattering anymore), the biographies of the authors, the composition of the editorial board and, of course, the soft almond green of the cover. All of these combined to form a strong feeling of continuity and evolution. It was like looking at family pictures of thirty years ago.
Carl Helstrom was the Editor and he had a truly lean editorial board. It included Wes Peterson as Editor for Coding, Laveen Kanal as Editor for Pattern Recognition, and John Thomas as Editor for Stochastic Processes, with (talking about continuity) Tom Cover as Editor for Book Reviews. That was it! Not even a special position for Shannon Theory, or Detection, or Source Coding! And who were the members of the AdCom of the Society (known today as the Board of Governors)? Bernard Elspas of the Stanford Research Institute was the President (called Chairman then) with Andy Viterbi Vice-Chairman for the Western District and Jim Massey Vice-Chairman for the Eastern District. Since that time, of course, we do not have this arcane distinction of Districts (let alone this particular one that certainly did not convey a very global view on the part of the Society). Among the remaining fifteen members of the AdCom, I saw the names of Balakrishnan, Busgang, Gallager, Golomb, Root, Huffman (yes, the Huffman), Mischa Schwartz, Slepian, and Wozencraft.
Turning to the contents of the Issue, a most interesting feature was the inclusion of selected papers that were presented at the 1967 International Symposium of Information Theory that had been held in San Remo, Italy, just six months earlier. The diligent readers of this column will recall that this was the Symposium that was scheduled to take place in Greece and had been hastily rescheduled and relocated as a result of the Athens coup d'etat of April 21, 1967 by a group of "Pagliacci"; who bore the rank of Colonel in the Greek Army and who led the country to a seven-year shameful regression.
The papers were the following:
Perhaps these were the equivalent of what we presently call long papers in our symposia, although two of these provided only a short abstract. The regular papers that followed were the following:
Notice the emphasis on nonlinear systems and on detection. Notice also the complete lack of error control coding and of the, so called, Shannon Theory (i.e., "core" Information Theory). In a way, these contents would resemble today more those of a journal on Communication Theory; and yet, the tone, style, and aesthetics of the presentation bore an unmistakable resemblance to those of almost any recent issue of our journal.
One striking, but not apparent, difference from the situation nowadays is the fact that of these twenty-four (24) papers, eight (8) were written by authors from Industry and one (1) by authors from a Government Agency; that is, more than 30% of the published contributions originated outside academic courses. Today this percentage is often zero. The high percentage of non-academic work at that time was encountered fairly consistently and was not a rare coincidence. By the way, only one of the Industry contributions in the March '68 issues came from AT&T. Is there a significance (or cause) to this change? Possibly, the change of focus in Industry today toward a shortcut to the marketplace provides one explanation. But, perhaps, another explanation is that the academic work has distanced itself more than it should from the world of applications. As a reader of that issue I had felt that not only the material was exciting and intellectually stimulating, but that, also, it was in the center of the action field. That made for a more rewarding and fulfilling experience. Can we make that happen again today? I am sure we can, because our field applies equally well now (and, in fact, to an increased number of applications). We simply need to reach out a little more and share the beauty and power of Information Theory.
Another interesting feature in that issue was the fact there were two (2) correspondence items. They were true "letters to the Editor", addressing a narrow, but interesting, technical issue rather than being papers of lesser importance as oftentimes correspondence items are thought of today. That difference, too, reinforced the feeling that the pressures of growth have altered somewhat the purity of the earlier days. Here was a lean, concise, and fresh account of work on a subject that was youthful and growing.
Perhaps, the view of the past tends to be romantic; nonetheless, revisiting old issues of the transactions is akin to touching the earth and thereby obtaining vigor and strength just as Antaeos did in the ancient myth. To defeat him, Hercules had to keep him up in the air for a sufficiently long time so as to deprive him of contacts with the earth which was the source of his vigor.