IEEE Circuits and Systems Society History
March 20, 1951 - First meeting of the IRE Professional Group on Circuit Theory.
March 25, 1963 - Name change to IEEE Professional Technical Group on Circuit Theory
1966 - Became Group on Circuit Theory
November 2, 1972 - Name change to IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.
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Link to IEEE Circuits and Systems Society
Conferences of the Society: the first outside the USA
The IRE (then IEEE) Circuit Theory Group developed an international perspective at a very early stage.
Initially it supported several different conferences related to Circuit Theory, but then decided to concentrate support on one Symposium per year (the forerunner of ISCAS).
After holding this event a couple of times in USA, by 1969 there was a wish to hold it outside the USA. A bid in May 1969 from the Circuit Theory Chapter of the IEEE United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland Section to host it in London, England in 1971, was accepted in August 1969.
An announcement in the March 1971 Newsletter of the Circuit Theory Group and the Call for Papers are illustrated here.
Some concerns were expressed at the time about the effect of a ‘financial downturn’ on the attendance, and the registration fee was increased slightly to compensate. The editor of the same March 1971 Newsletter (Frank Boesch) wrote ‘….the economic condition of the engineering community in the United States is presently very poor……’
He also quoted some airline ticket costs: New York to London $210, and London to New York $255 – with a possibility of Charter Flights for $175 round trip. Numerically those are comparable to today’s costs, and considering the inflation since 1971, it is evident how dramatically the real cost of flying has fallen.
A postal strike in UK at the time of paper submission and review led to some temporary worries, but the event was judged to be a success and led directly to the policy of regularly holding ISCAS outside the USA which has been maintained ever since then.
Although the London Symposium was organised in the full knowledge of and with some cooperation from the National Society (IEE), some of the organisers feared that ‘retribution’ from IEE might follow afterwards. An indirect consequence was the initiation with the assistance of IEE of the ECCTD series of conferences, still held every two years in Region 8, which some staff and members of IEE hoped would keep IEEE out of Europe – in fact, there has normally been a cooperative association between IEEE CAS and ECCTD.
Anthony C. Davies
(Written in March 2003 for the CAS Society Directory)
