The International Symposium on Data Transmission

The International Symposium on Data Transmission, which was held at the Delft Institute of Technology, the Netherlands, in September, 1960, was the first major open meeting to be held on the subject, which may be broadly defined as the transmission of information in digital form. It was organized because members of the committee felt that the time had come to bring together those who are doing research and development in new techniques, those who operate communication networks; and the .potential customers who wish to transmit digital information. The goal was to narrow the gap between theory. and practice. As it turned out, the time was indeed propitious, and interest ran so high that the Symposium grew far larger, both in number of papers and in number of participants, than the organizing committee had originally expected. Papers were presented by authors from the USA, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and France, and to many it came as a pleasant surprise to find that so much work was being done in so many different places. The papers may be grouped under four headings as follows: 1) experimental results, 2) codes for error correction and detection, 3) special techniques, and 4) complete systems. Although it has not been possible to print all papers in full in this special issue of the IRE Transactions, there is given below a brief indication of the contents of each.