State of the Journal

W the fi rst issue of volume number C57, the IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC) will enter a new year of publication, a long journey started more than 50 years ago. If you are an old timer like me who enjoys navigating through dusty paper copies of TC in your institutional library, you will be surprised to fi nd that, initially, volumes were numbered EC1 through EC16. This refl ects the origin of this publication as derived from the IEEE Professional Group on “Electronic Computers.” It was then changed to its current name (simply “Computers,” by omitting the redundant or just obvious “Electronic”) with the 17th volume as C17. Signifi cantly, this long tradition has established TEC/TC as the oldest among all transactions sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society (the next oldest is the Transactions on Software Engineering, which started in 1975, followed by the Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence in 1979). Throughout the years, the organization of TC has experienced signifi cant changes; a signifi cant change occurred 10 years ago when the operational organization was moved from a strictly volunteer-based team (mostly associated with the Editor-In-Chief) to include a full-time professional entreprise as run daily by the staff of the IEEE Computer Society offi ce in Los Alamitos, California. This change was accelerated by the Web-based facilities provided for TC as well as all CS-sponsored publications. The volunteer base has also undergone changes: The Editorial Board has been enlarged and, in line with most Transactions, TC is now led by an Editor-In-Chief (EIC) and an Associate EIC (AEIC); all EICs and AEICs of IEEE TC are listed below with the volume numbers corresponding to their appointment.