THE March 1987 issue of PC Transactions (PC-30, 1) featured a questionnaire for readers, under the heading “Concerning Two-Way Communication….”

When flutist James Galway was named to the principal's hair in the Berlin Philharmonic, it is said, his father wrote him from Ireland to the effect that this was all very nice, but when was he going to get a real job? When are you going to get a real job, my communicator friend? And you there, you the engineer, aren't you just playing games at the computer and calling it report-writing?

The general area of communications is a large field in which to swing a cat, or to edit a journal: • It encompasses not only written documentation, but oral (and oral/visual and even video) presentations, plus those pictures that are worth a thousand words. Even those that aren't. • It includes not only what is written, said, and depicted, but the techniques with which they are produced. Communications technology is changing daily, and it is changing the ways we work. It addresses an audience ranging from the publications professional with 30 years experience in getting books out the door, through the PhD in rhetoric, to the engineer who is simply trying to communicate research results to management.

The great differences that disturb the peace of mankind are not about ends but means. We have all the same general desires, but how those desires shall be accomplished will for ever be disputed.