Silver anniversary for engineering marriage
13 August 2007
Not so much a marriage as a union - and the lucky couple are the production and test engineer. Barely on speaking terms a quarter of a century ago, and certainly not co-operating as we would expect today, the relationship has evolved over the 25 years - sometimes with a bit of help from its (publishing) friends
Regular readers of this column may be scratching your heads – how long have I been getting this email newsletter – two months, three, four? Well, we are in fact entering our fourth month, which makes it a bit strange to start talking about anniversaries. But a particular anniversary is upon us, as it was a quarter of a century ago when this newsletter, or at least its ancestor, was originally conceived. Electronics Manufacture & Test started life as a magazine for the British electronics assembly engineering community, and, uniquely at the time, identified that the long term success of electronics depended on having an integrated test and production process. And in terms of success I principally mean efficiency and quality. I am glad to say I was too young at the time to be part of this bold publishing exercise, but I am reliably informed that it was scoffed at at the time and was still being dismissed (by our competitors – not our readers) when I joined the EM&T team 13 years ago.
The world in 1982 was a very different place. Surface mount was only just beginning to enter the mainstream (although it had been around on a small scale for many years before that), and IBM’s first PCs were only a year or so old - and cost more than they do today! The notion that production and test engineers should talk, let alone co-operate, was fanciful to say the least. Production engineers thought that they provided all the value and test engineers thought they had all the intellect – it was often an uneasy relationship. The gradual merging of the two disciplines was borne from necessity and it now seems rediculous as well as archaic that it should be any other way. And so, the magazine that had championed this stance, Electronics Manufacture & Test, became required reading for the industry.
And much as our magazine remains an important part of the industry’s communications within the UK, it is clear that the technology used in the UK is the same as is used throughout the world and that the influences that are shaping the industry at ‘home’ are the same as, or the consequences of, what is happening everywhere else in the world. The step from Electronics Manufacture & Test to EMTWorldWide was both logical and necessary.
The actual anniversary issue in the UK comes next month and it is an issue that will contain much that is entertaining, informative and thought-provoking. Some of it is only of relevance to the UK, but much of it (for the reasons given above) will be of interest to the industry at large and will be uploaded onto this web site. One of my plans was to get a view of the NEXT 25 years from the SMART Group, Europe’s largest trade association for our industry. In typical enthusiastic fashion they produced not one but three versions and as they all have distinctly different visions of the future, I have decided to serialise these over the coming weeks, starting with a well-known industry figure, Indium’s Dr Ron Lasky (Click here). If any of our readers would like to add any ideas of what the next 25 years might bring please email them to me and I will put them together as an additional feature at the end of this series.
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