compiled by
June 1992
The NEEDHA history was written by Keith Carver in 1992, and distributed in paper form to the NEEDHA membership at that time. The report was intended to inform NEEDHA members about the efforts of those who have participated earlier, help NEEDHA leaders understand the history of the organization, and serve as a resource for those interested in the history of electrical engineering education.
The paper edition is out of print. It is hoped that this Web edition will be a useful substitute.
In producing the Web edition, no attempt was made to bring the material in the report up to date. The original material was changed as little as possible. The report was treated as a historical document, rather than a living, changeable document. In particular, no mention is made of the change of name from NEEDHA to ECEDHA in 2001.
The only changes to the text were the following actions:
The document has been formatted to fit its new medium. This was done by identifying segments of the report as paragraphs, headers, lists, and so on, and then letting Web browsers do their thing. The various tables, most of which are in the appendices, were left in their original format, as nearly as possible.
Footnotes were implemented as forward-and-backward links, using bracketed numbers rather than superscripts, which are not supported by all browsers.
The Table of Contents was formatted as a set of links to the appropriate places in the report. Page numbers were removed, since they have no meaning in the Web edition.
For the convenience of readers, references within the text to appendices or other sections of the report were made into anchors linked to the other places.
The two figures were scanned and reduced in size to fit the default size of common browsers. As a result the writing on the map is not readable, so a client-side image map technique was used to display the sites of NEEDHA meetings when the cursor is passed over them.
The letterhead and signature in Appendix I were scanned and given a transparent background.
There is an index of names which includes page numbers in the printed edition. These page numbers have been retained, even though they have no meaning in the Web edition, because each name's list shows how many times that name appears. The "find" feature of Web browsers can be used to locate any of these names in the text.
The report contains some information that might be more useful if brought up to date. Examples are the lists of ECEDHA officers and the list of meetings. Although the history document is "frozen" as of 1992, there are other pages in the ECEDHA Web site that contain up to date information:
Information about more recent ECEDHA events can be found in the ECEDHA Web archives and Newsletters: