From The Editor

No work of significant value is produced in a vacuum. Behind every product, there are real people with real stories to tell. For instance, the newspaper you hold in your hands and its daily online counterpart are brought to you by some of the smartest, most battle-tested reporters, editors, artists and production people known to the publishing industry. They are the EE Times people behind EE Times.

But what about the people behind the innovations and technologies that our editors cover? They're Times people too.

The charter of this special issue is to acquaint you with some of the people who are driving technology. We wanted to get a sense of what motivates the folks who think up the ideas, create the designs and develop the innovative software, all in the interest of realizing a viable technological future.

Our editors scoured the industry to come up with a representative personality for each of 19 technology categories, from microprocessors to machine intelligence. What they found was that besides being technologists and engineers at heart and on the job, the people whose ideas and actions fuel this industry are also parents and spouses, mountain climbers and hang-gliders, musicians and collectors.

The people behind the technologies, it turns out, are people with aspirations, forbearance, pride and emotions-in other words, people just like you and me.

Sometimes, amid the dizzying pace of technological change, we forget that real people make it all happen. And while their current charter is the pursuit of the Next Big Thing, their roots are in such activities as determining the intricate relationship between the strings on a guitar and mathematical extrapolations of string numbers, or in the exhilaration that comes from conquering a mountain and, at its summit, envisioning the next palm-sized wireless multimedia device.

These are the "TimesPeople" behind the technologies and in the news. We dedicate this "TimesPeople '98" special issue to them. Look for more of them in our new weekly TimesPeople section in the new year.

Return to: TimesPeople 98