On Communications and Data Processing: A Foreword

Communications has historically been acknowledged as the pace-setter in the development of electronics technology. In recent decades automatic data processing has emerged as another vital and energetic source of progress in the same area of technology. Although advances in one field have generally been made independently of those in the other, many workers in both communications and data processing have come to realize, in the course of making further progress, that the two fields are becoming more interdependent. In a steadily increasing number of cases, developments in one field have resulted in, or been reinforced by, developments in the other.