by Commissioner Paul S. Atkins
Thank you, David. I am delighted to be with you here today at your national conference in celebration of the Society's 60th year. To remind ourselves of how much the world has changed since 1946, let us look back at some other things that happened in the Society's birth year. It is amazing how much the world has changed in those 60 years.
It was in 1946 that Winston Churchill coined the term "iron curtain," which he described as stretching from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic. Fifteen years later that Iron Curtain crystallized as the Berlin Wall, and it took until the bloodless revolution in November 1989 that Ronald Reagan launched for that horrible scar across the face of Europe to fall. It was in 1946 that the United Nations General Assembly met for the first time and the League of Nations held its last meeting. 1946 was the year in which the Nuremburg trials took place. Two classics made their appearance in 1946: the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, and Dr. Spock's Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care. Coincidentally, all this happened in the same year that marked the start of the baby boom. Just a few blocks away from here, on February 14, 1946, the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering introduced the world to the electronic numerical integrator and computer, or ENIAC, which plunged the world into the computer age.
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