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The history of AISB is certainly of interest and I would like to add some precision to your statement (Artificial Intelligence Review (1987) 1 ,137-138) that ECAI-82 was "retrospectively declared to have been the first ECAI". Your statement could be misunderstood by some nasty minded people (and such people seem to exist among us scientists) as a hint at tension caused by some underhand appropriat ion of the 1982 AISB meeting by the newly formed European Coordinating Commit tee on AI. It is quite true that during the winter of 1979, when the AISB commit tee decided that I would be the general chairman for the 1982 meeting, it was understood that the meeting would be an AISB event, and everyone knew that the only European AI meeting was the AISB one. However, during the winter of 1981, when we were preparing the Call-for-Papers for the meeting, we all agreed that the name ECAI would be better than AISB. Therefore all the conference anouncements and proceedings were given the name "ECAI-82". You should be aware of this as you had a paper, enti t led "How to write a story", on pages 259-260 of these proceedings. ECAI and ECCAI are the chi ldren of AISB, their birth took place under the AISB commit tee 's supervision. I would not like to claim that everything has been perfect and rosy. It can be said, for instance, that ECCAI has quickly become more than the s imple umbrella organization it was planned to be. We have also had some benefit sharing problems, the AISB commit tee which inherited ECAI and ECCAI was not the commit tee that decided their birth, and so on and so forth. In the case of ECAI-82, Great Britain wil l ingly offered Europe something which she was holding in her hand. This may seem utterly unbelievable to today's young 'wolves ' but, as far as I have witnessed, this is the process which took place!