The Better Mix: 1985-1990

Computer entered 1985 with a new editor in chief (EIC), the second drawn from the IEEE Computer Society’s growing ranks of volunteers. In choosing an EIC, the Board of Governors wanted to see “a better mix of university and industry types” as well as “a better mix of universityand industrygenerated technical articles.” They appointed Michael Mulder, who had experience in both worlds—he had worked in an industrial setting at the Bonneville Power Administration and at the University of Portland in Oregon as a professor. To meet these new standards, Mulder had to move Computer beyond the traditional boundaries of a professional magazine. The topic of Mulder’s first issue reflected the expanding world of computing, with the bulk of the articles dealing with the processing, representation, translation, and entry of Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji. It was a timely subject, as East Asia was becoming increasingly important to computing. Japan had already built a substantial integrated circuit industry and Taiwan was following its lead. In the summer of 1983, The New York Times noted that Japan was determined to get a major position in the computing industry. “Japan’s commitment,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote, “[is] to produce within a decade a new generation of computers so immensely powerful that they will constitute a revolutionary new form of wealth.” When Mulder became EIC, Computer was no longer the sole Computer Society magazine. The year before it had been joined by IEEE Software, a periodical with “the ambitious goal of being one of the preeminent magazines for software practitioners,” according to its founding EIC, Bruce Shriver. As a result, for much of Mulder’s tenure with Computer, the magazine favored articles about hardware over software. Articles included discussions of new architectures, parallelism, hardware description languages, high-performance computing, AI machines, mass storage, and similar topics. Networking commanded only a few articles, and software topics were present but filled only about a quarter of the pages. Toward the end of 1985, Mulder joined forces with Peter Denning, EIC of Communications of the ACM, to produce a joint issue. It was a unique event. ACM and the Computer Society had much in common, including the bulk of their members. They had collaborated on a number of activities, The Better Mix: 1985–1990