From the Editor's Desk

From Paul Ceruzzi’s important study of Konrad Zuse’s early computers (July 1981) and the informative and engaging accounts of the buildup, product development, and software contributions of IBM Boeblingen by Karl Ganzhorn and Albert Endres (July 2004) to Corrina Schlomb’s comparative examination of IBM and Remington Rand’s German/European strategies (October 2008), Timo Leimbach’s analysis of German software giant SAP (October 2008), and last issue’s study of Cold War GDR computing by Simon Donig, many important accounts and works of scholarship on the German history of computing have been published in the Annals. At the same time, many critical topics have yet to be significantly addressed. In the 1970s, Heinz Nixdorf AG was the leading German computer firm—an enterprise that subsequently funded one of the premiere history of computing museums in the world—yet it has not been studied in any depth in the Annals or other English-language publications. Prior to this issue, the same was true of electronics giant AEG-Telefunken’s fundamental contributions to German and European computing with its TR 4 and TR 440 computers. Pioneers from AEGTelefunken’s TR 440 team richly document these developments in the first four articles of this issue. They explore the company and the development of its strategy for creating large-scale computers, detail the organization and design work to produce the TR 440 computer, outline the software development effort for this system, and examine the TR 440 from the perspective of its users. These articles were collectively planned by the authors (Eike Jessen, Dieter Michel, Hans-Juergen Siegert, Heinz Voigt, and Hans Rüdiger Wiehle), but the submissions were not officially proposed as a special issue. Once the articles passed peer review, I corresponded with the authors about publishing them all in one issue (with a publication position defined by the date that the last of the four articles passed peer review). As such, there was an unusually long time from initial submission to publication. I am very sad to report that one of the authors passed away on 2 December 2008: Heinz Voigt, who was the chief engineer for the TR 440 Structure and Hardware. His fellow authors asked that I pass along their deep grief of his passing, as well as the following thoughts: