A Brief History of the NSREC

This is the 50 year anniversary of the annual IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effect Conference (NSREC). The first official IEEE NSREC was held at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA in 1964. Although the NSREC started primarily as a forum for the reporting of U.S. research on nuclear weapons effects in electronics it has grown to be primarily an international conference on the effect of space radiation on microelectronics. In this paper the history of NSREC will be discussed in terms of changes in technical content, change in mix of papers between industry, government labs and universities, change in venue, growth in number of authors per paper and the addition of new features in the conference.