A Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of TIM
TIM turns to Volume 70 in 2021, indicating its 70th anniversary. It was in 1952 that the Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Instrumentation was launched, which in 1955 was renamed to IRE Transactions on Instrumentation. Papers of both can still be accessed in IEEE Xplore. IRE was the Institute of Radio Engineers, which in 1963 merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) to form the present-day IEEE. Subsequently, in 1963 the name of the transactions was changed to the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. Figure 1 below shows all TIM EiCs1 and the more recent Administrators. You can see the bios of the EiCs at the bottom of TIM’s Editorial Board webpage2. There is no EiC listed until Volume I-6, Issue 3, 1957, although historical records indicate that George B. Hoadley was EiC since 19533 or 19544. It should also be mentioned that in 1996, Raymond S. Turgel became TIM’s EiC, but he could not serve in this role due to an unexpected severe health issue, and so Steve Dyer took over the EiC duties again.
Like other journals, TIM has gone through many transitions due to technology advancements and authors’ expectations. Stephen A. Dyer, TIM’s EiC from 1992 to 1999, shares some interesting insights on the challenges of the editorial process in the 1990s:
"Technological capabilities were certainly different in the early 1990s from what is available today. A typical computer would be a `486/33MHz CPU with about 120 MB of hard disk and running MS-DOS 5 or 6 (Windows 95 was yet to be); e-mail was available but primitive; the World Wide Web would wait until the mid-1990s; choices for relational database systems were few and very expensive, and the list goes on. TIM’s official correspondence and the manuscripts and their various revisions were transferred by postal mail, entirely manually. I spent much of the first several months writing relational-database code in C, and using the Codebase 4.5 library of functions so that we could automate many of the aspects of manuscript tracking. At the time, the page limit for a paper was set to five for regular papers and four for special-issue papers. We carefully measured every manuscript upon receipt to get a close estimate of its length after typesetting—I had constructed a set of templates to facilitate that operation—and we notified the author(s) of the estimated length.
The various steps in the manuscript-handling process were quite time-consuming, even after partial automation. Ed Richter had told me that he spent about 30 hours per week on the editorial task, and I was incredulous at that statement. But indeed, I found, early on, that the job required anywhere between 30 and 50 hours per week. At that point, I understood why editors had tended to be retired from their careers; as for me, I had a day job to contend with!