The papermill [Reflections]

A long time ago I wrote my first technical paper. I was really proud to see my name on the index of an IEEE Transactions issue. I was an author! Many people were impressed — me, my mother, and possibly a few friends and neighbors who happened to glimpse the issue as it lay casually placed on top of the living-room coffee table. For years to come I would be able to drop into technical libraries and find myself incarcerated, as it were, in the dusty stacks. What a marvelous system for publication we engineers had!