TIME was already rolling off the presses on a Sunday five weeks ago when the exiled Shah of Iran quietly boarded a plane in Panama for his newest sanctuary in Egypt. Normally, such a late-breaking development would have to go unreported in those copies of the magazine produced in faraway Hong Kong. But no more. Only a week earlier TIME had begun transmitting its pages to the Far East at lightning speed via RCA'S Satcom II and the Comsat Intelsat IV, communications satellites some 20,000 miles above earth. Supplanting a dizzying combination of Hong Kong-bound planes, couriers and other conveyances subject to the failings of man and weather, the system is the first in publishing history equipped to beam four-color finished pages as well as black-and-white photos and text by satellite. Says Reginald Brack, who as associate publisher oversaw development of the system: "For us, it makes the jet age obsolete."

TIME'S Hong Kong connection is the latest breakthrough in a continuing campaign to speed the magazine's production and distribution processes. Last summer we introduced a computerized composition system that sets type, combines it with black-and-white pictures and produces a finished page ready for the presses, a process that is used to take many hands and many hours. Also last summer, TIME began to eliminate its dependence on conventional transportation by sending completed pages by telephone line simultaneously to computers in our U.S. printing plants and to one in The Netherlands, where copies for Europe, the Middle East and Africa are produced. In September, TIME pioneered the satellite transmission of four-color pages. Each week, color engravings are beamed from the magazine's Manhattan production center to a Western Union transmitter in New Jersey, and from there via Westar satellite to printing plants in Chicago and Los Angeles.

All of this space-age hardware gives TIME the flexibility to make rapid changes as the news breaks and to speed the distribution of the magazine to our 27 million readers around the world. But the changes are perhaps most apparent in the Far East, where TIME now arrives on newsstands 24 hours earlier than before--and, because of time zone differences, earlier than anywhere else on earth.

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