This month´s cover ...

All members of this Society recently received a complimentary copy of the IEEE IMS Magazine, published by our sister society, Instrumentation and Measurements, which contained papers selected from the 2004 Autotestcon conference. [Our cover photograph was taken at that meeting in San Antonio; Autotestcon 2005 will be held later this month.] A bit of history: Automatic test equipment "came of age" with the establishment of Project SETE - the Secretariat for Electronic Test Equipment - at New York University in the early 1960s. SETE sponsored several annual meetings devoted to the subject; one tangible result was the publication of the IRE Transactions on Military Electronics, MIL-6, 3, (July 1962), completely devoted to Automated Testing Techniques. This was the fIrst professional society publication devoted to the subject. (Military Electronics was one of the four societies that merged to form the present AESS in 1965, following the merger of IRE and AlEE to form the IEEE in 1963.) AESS has jointly sponsored Autotestcon with our sister IEEE IMS Society, starting in 1972 with the conference in Philadelphia. Some years after the establishment of Autotestcon by the S1. Louis Section in 1965, AESS joined with their team. St. Louis Section could not sustain an annual meeting, soAESS took on the task of establishing it as an annual meeting. For the Philadelphia meeting (the first meeting not in St. Louis), the Philadelphia Section joined with AESS and IMS to form the present "triad" of sponsorship: AESS, IMS, and the local Section. The growth has trended steadily upward ever since, validating the sponsorship arrangement.