From: siegman@stanford.edu   
      
   In article ,   
    Salmon Egg  wrote:   
      
   > All this nostalgia is prodding my failing memory. I remember attending   
   > informal conferences on electron devices that concentrated mostly on   
   > microwave tubes when masers were creeping in. I vaguely remember   
   > attending a rather poor parody entitled something like Miss Ruby Maser.   
      
   Those were the famous "Tube Conferences"!  Long history, dating back   
   into at least the 1940s (maybe 1930s?).  Held every summer on one or   
   another university campus: participants stayed in dorm rooms, a BBQ the   
   first evening and a banquet the second (or maybe the reverse).  Skits   
   and parodies at the banquet: Dr. Lester Field (noted early tube   
   researcher) parodied as "Dr. Restless Meadow"; IBM researchers parodied   
   working in an IBM office under large sign saying "MEDITATE"; amateur   
   chorus sining "The Beam is Green When Seen Upon the Screen".   
      
   {And then there was the banquet where, as a young and very naive junior   
   researcher, I got to see John R. Pierce -- who was essentially the Lord   
   God of these meetings -- drunk out of his mind, being carried out in the   
   middle of one of these banquets, at Rickey's in Palo Alto, by four other   
   senior figures, one for each arm and leg, including my dissertation   
   adviser and three other senior figures from Bell Labs.)   
      
   There's probably an informal history on the IEEE History Site somewhere   
   (lots of great, searchable oral histories on that site).   
      
   > MY CURIOSITY QUESTION: Is the Stanford University library not capable of   
   > tracking down such publications? When I was at Hughes, its library had a   
   > genealogy for all these publications. It was very good at rooting out   
   > old papers.   
      
   The citation to the Weber publication exists in various databases   
   (although there is some variability in the exact dates and volume   
   numbers), but the actual published documents available in various   
   archives for those early papers are very scattered, if they exist at   
   all.  It was -- apparently? -- first a talk at one of the Tube   
   Conferences, and there were no conference proceedings or publications at   
   all for those meetings; the official policy was that talks at the   
   meeting were not to be recorded ***and not even referenced or cited   
   afterwards***.  So, any actual publication would be subsequent to that.   
   The IEEE Xplore database doesn't seem to have it; I've just not tried   
   digging back into physical archives at Stanford -- and Stanford is   
   aggressively closing down department libraries, and sending older   
   materials to distant warehouses, or the dump.   
      
   [And look how long it's take just to get BSTJ available on line!]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)