Wolfe's Den: Our 40th anniversary is all about you

We are you and you are we, and we are all together. That twist on the Beatles' lyric encapsulates what EE Times' fortieth anniversary is all about. You can see it in our 40th Anniversary special section, in the print issue subscribers will receive in the mail soon, and in our upcoming iPad App.

What we're celebrating is not just that EE Times is a grand old brand, which brought true journalism to the “illiterathon” that was the trade press. OK, actually McGraw-Hill's Electronics magazine did this first, but EE Times took the tech pub out of the management suite and into the engineer’s lab.

We're also putting new wine into our virtual bottle, reinventing ourselves as a vital, online community destination. We're expanding our focus to give you more analysis that's directly relevant to the challenges you and your design team face.  We've beefed up our coverage of China. And you are increasingly becoming both part of the conversation -- via comments on our stories -- as well as creators of technical content , which resonates with your peers.

The common theme driving that mashup is that EE Times intends to remain the first engineering stop for the je ne sais quoi -- we really don't know exactly what it is -- of all things electronic, from analog to Z-waves.

One thing we do know for a fact is that EE Times, founded in 1972 by the Leeds family, has had more societal impact but received less credit than any tech brand extant or dead. (In this way, we mirror our audience of engineers.) We've been hailed as the Whole Earth Catalog of the electronics world. Our stories have been re-reported, mostly without credit, by every mainstream media outlet you can think of.

We were the first to cover digital television, as it developed initially in Japan, and all things multimedia, including graphics chips and MPEG.  We broke the story of the Pentium FDIV bug in 1994. The late Frank Burge, who had a long association with EE Times, helped start Steve Jobs's career in the 1970s by connecting him with public-relations guru Regis McKenna, for whom Frank worked at the time.

So EE Times's fortieth anniversary is really for you, dear readers, to honor your visionary colleagues who built the foundation of the modern world, as well as those who are remaking its future. In honoring them, we are honoring you, because no engineer is an island, and few innovations succeed without a stellar team behind them.

In producing our 40th coverage, it's fair to say that today's EE Times crew stands on the shoulders of giants -- the hundreds of dedicated reporters, editors, sales, marketing, and audience development people who've been a part of our family since the beginning.  May this milestone awaken fond memories of your time here, and may it help your significant others finally understand what it is you did over the years, and why it consumed so much of your psychic energy.

I believe it's because electronics isn't a job, it's a calling. If that sounds too highfalutin, let's just say you're changing the world one project at a time.

May our profiles -- please note we'll be adding new articles daily -- inspire your career future. So please join me and visit our special section, participate, and email your thoughts to me at alex.wolfe@ubm.com.