The renaming will be in line with the scope of work this office now encompasses, which has expanded beyond its orignal setup as a customer service centre, and will be consistent with the name of the other non-U.S. office, the European Operations Centre located in Brussels. As the IEEE Communications Society Office, our focus for 1997 will be increased interaction and coordination with our volunteers, and participation in Communications Society events in the Asia Pacific Region. We are currently coordinating a Distinguished Lecture Tour by Prof. David Goodman to all five Communications Society chapters in Australia. An abstract of the two-hour talk by Prof. Goodman follows. Although telephone networks incorporate sophisticated information technology, the telephones that we use at home and at work have changed very little in the last 60 years.
Computers are the opposite.
While the telephones on our desks are primitive information devices, our PCs are extremely advanced. The situation will change drastically over the next 13 years. After a century of stately evolution, telephones and telephone networks will experience a massive paradigm shift. In 1997, the seeds of change are germinating in the domain of PCS, which eventually will unite telephone and computer communications. While everyone agrees that the first two letters of PCS stand for personal communications, the S has six meanings which together reflect the high volume of PCS activity in technical, government, and business domains.