Famous bylines in IEEE Spectrum [Spectral Lines]

A magazine, like a politician, needs friends. And the more powerful, the better. Throughout its first 50 years, IEEE Spectrum has benefited in no small measure from the support of the great, the famous, and the well-connected. Sometimes they agreed to be interviewed about a sizzling topic of the day; sometimes they shared a personal recollection of a landmark breakthrough; sometimes they pulled strings behind the scenes for us. Every now and then they tipped us off to an upcoming event of seismic consequence. From time to time, they even wrote articles for us. Indeed, the roster of dazzling bylines in Spectrum is long. Members of the trio associated with the establishment of Intel-Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andrew Grove- are listed as authors or coauthors on four different Spectrum articles. (Moore, however, contributed his most famous magazine article-the 1965 piece that introduced his eponymous law-to Electronics magazine, our archrival in those days.) William Shockley, one of the three inventors of the transistor and a former boss of Noyce and Moore, wrote a turgid feature we published in 1966 called "Articulated Science Teaching and Balanced Emphasis." The article is interesting today mainly for a passage in which Shockley recallsa protracted argument, at age 15, with a science teacher concerning the best way to calculate the forces on a rowboat.