Editorial: Changes in Publishing
Reinhardt B. Schuhmann · Physical Review Letters · 2008
began with three new ideas: A journal comprised wholly of Letters, typewriter composition, and photolithographic printing.I address these issues from a personal perspective, via a brief account of my encounters with some of the changes that have taken place over the 50 years of PRL, years that overlap my own quite closely.Those of us this age and older did things that are no longer common.We used slide rules, and log and trig tables.We dialed Bakelite phones on party lines, and fixed TVs by replacing tubes.My parents met at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C.By the mid 1960s my father had moved to Goddard Space Flight Center, abuzz with the Apollo program, and my mother was at the University of Maryland.One of them brought home a Wang calculator, about half the size of a typewriter, with a large Nixie tube display.It would add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and also calculate square roots, logs, cosines, etc.! My parents told me, an 11-yearold, not to break the government's expensive miraculous device.Six years on, near my high school graduation, most students had a small calculator that would do more.Slide rules were gone.Early in my school experience there were no photocopiers.Tests were printed on duplicator machines, which used wax templates and organic solvents to produce bad copies that got fainter as more were produced.When photocopiers appeared, initially they used liquid toner, which could leak onto your original.There was such a copier in the physics department at the time of my first involvement in submittal of a manuscript, to PRB, as an undergraduate.Copying was risky.We wrote the manuscript long hand, on a legal pad, and then someone in the physics office typed it on an IBM Selectric, which produced Greek and other characters via changes in ball.We revised by retyping entire pages, or retyping sections, pasting them in, and photocopying the result.We drew the figures by hand, traced them in India ink, and did lettering with a Leroy lettering set of pens and templates.Finally, we mailed the manuscript to the APS editorial office, along with black-and-white photographs of the figures.Soon IBM PCs appeared, only to be replaced soon in our department by Macs, which had nice graphics as well as word processing.