THIS issue and the next will feature some papers from the 4th IFAC Congress which was held in Warsaw, Poland during June, 1969. Another feature of this issue is the first paper by R. Oldenburger, one of the founders of IFAC, who was invited by Editorial Board chairman, H. Chestnut, to write an article about the formation of I FAC. The result is a highly detailed, historical and interesting personal account of the creation of ! FAC, and it includes several intimate reflections of the personalities and events involved as well as some rather philosophical control viewpoints of the author, his early contributions, and the importance of control.
It should be noted that the IFAC Congress papers were suggested for possible publication on the basis of various program committee evaluations and recommendations which were originally used to select papers for presentation at the Congress. Therefore, all of these selected papers were further reviewed and evaluated by our associate editors and their referees. Consequently, not all of the recommended papers were accepted. In fact, those which have finally been chosen for publication have been revised, often quite extensively, even with new titles in some cases.
Exceptions to this review procedure are the IFAC Survey papers which are included in a separate section. It was decided by the Editorial Board that these papers, representing some recent thoughts of leading investigators and practitioners in various fields, should be published as soon as possible without extensive review or revision to distribute this information with a minimum delay.
Certainly not all of the outstanding Congress papers can be published in this journal, but it is hoped that enough of them will be published to illustrate the large number of countries and the wide variety of subjects which were represented at the Congress.
Because of the variety of subjects, it is difficult to decide on a logical arrangement of the papers which will provide a desirable property of continuity to this issue. It might have been feasible to select and hold certain types of papers and group them together to provide a special issue on a particular subject, but this was not done because only one or two papers from each of the 50 technical sessions on common subjects were candidates for publication, and not all could be evaluated and revised at the same time. Thus, a variety of subjects