I started writing for LCGC in the summer of 1987. At the time, I was involved with an instrument company team specifying a new gas chromatograph. I
remember the project's emphasis on the user — this was to be an instrument that offered new levels of performance in a package
that was accessible for everyday work. Rather than being either a high-performance research-grade instrument or a routine
device, the new system had features that would make it useful to both groups. This same practical theme was then, and still
is today, an integral part of LCGC's charter. The magazine occupies a unique niche between purely scientific journals and trade publications that are mostly
product-driven. The tenacity of the magazine, persisting as it has through a number of major changes over the years, is a
testimonial to the strength of this concept.
While the magazine strove to keep its identity in the midst of ongoing changes, publishing technologies evolved in parallel.
When the magazine began in 1983, the Internet existed only as an international communications network used primarily by governmental
and educational institutions. The worldwide web — based on hypertext data protocols — had yet to come into existence although
e-mail was alive and well by then. We relied on faxes and postal mail to submit handwritten manuscripts that were transcribed
by a secretary, and to review galley proofs. Figures were drawn by illustrators in black and white, largely by hand, with
chromatograms pasted in from chart recordings. Slides for presentations were produced in a photo lab. The IBM PC/XT and Microsoft
Windows were introduced in that year, and the Apple Macintosh followed one year later. Within two years, I had a couple of
XT's — one in the lab and one in the office — that ran WordPerfect 1.1 and could interface with a "Nelson Box," a popular
analog-to-digital interface for chromatography. I remember being pleased with the primitive word processor's ability to produce
nice-looking equations using its crude font controls and half-line spacing. But we relied on the "sneakernet" to move data
from one computer to another with floppy disks or tape cartridges — it would be almost ten more years before the computers
inside the building were reliably interconnected and longer than that for the Internet to penetrate onto what we call today
our "desktops."
Now, 25 years later, I write on the direct descendants of those hardware and software platforms. The computers and applications
are orders of magnitude faster and more capable, but fundamentally they are not very different. If I were to send a modern-day
laptop back 25 years to myself — I won't comment on just how that might be accomplished — I'd have little trouble understanding
it or learning to use it, although I'd be impressed with the degree of integration of the mechanical and electronic parts.
The same is true with modern chromatographs — the basic components and associated technologies are pretty much the same, but
the level of performance and capability have increased tremendously and the degree of electro–mechanical integration is impressive.
I'll discuss some of these areas briefly in this article.
During these 25 years the publishing process has become quite direct and nearly completely virtualized. I don't use a secretary
to transcribe my terrible handwriting — in fact my handwriting has declined due to lack of use. I don't have to straighten
the axes on my chromatograms — they're already precisely straight; if I want to make slides I just paste — in the virtual
sense—the artwork and text into a presentation file; galley proofs are sent back and forth by e-mail and are corrected on-screen.
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