This week's cover story, on the impending breakup of AT&T and the telecommunications revolution that is both a part and a result of this event, was written by Associate Editor John S. DeMott and reported largely by New York-based Correspondent Bruce van Voorst. A nine-year veteran of TIME who specializes in business and economics stories, DeMott was particularly pleased with the assignment because it permitted him to deal with a lifelong passion. "I've been fascinated by communications ever since I was a kid with two tin cans and a taut string between them," he says. "When I was ten, I got my own $10.95 telecommunications network: two battery-powered toy telephones that a friend and I rigged between our houses." DeMott soon graduated to more complicated gadgets, setting up telegraph keys with a teen-age friend and building electronic devices from six Heath-kits, including his own ham radio rig, stereo and FM tuner. More recently he installed cordless telephones in his New York City apartment and in his country house in the Catskills. "I'm almost as interested in how people communicate as in what is communicated," says DeMott. "My father was a newspaperman, and I remember vividly being in his office as a child and watching the wirephotos coming in seemingly out of nowhere."

Business Editor George M. Taber, who edited the cover story, has had a continuing interest in the information revolution, especially in bringing it about at TIME. Over the past several years, the magazine has employed more and more of the new communications equipment, gradually computerizing the phases of production, from distributing correspondents' dispatches to transmitting completed pages for printing, and linking them by phone lines and satellites. Under Taber's supervision, the Business section was the first editorial department, in 1981, to go all-electronic, researching, writing, editing and sending stories to print with a minimum of paper handling. Taber has added an important refinement to the system. He helped work out a procedure that links his home computer to TIME'S mainframe unit, enabling him to make late weekend changes in stories without a three-hour round trip between his home in Princeton, N.J., and New York City. Says he: "This is what the communications revolution discussed in our cover story is all about." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.