S.O. Rice's Contributions to Shannon Theory

Shannon's monumental paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" [1], which was to forever alter man's understanding of the communication process, appeared in the second half of 1948. It immediately attracted great attention and was much heralded by the communication engineering community, especially by the academics. But in reality, only a very few research oriented engineers understood it clearly at that time. There was much lipservice given to it by the long-practicing engineer, but there was also much misunderstanding and many attempted misapplications. The theory introduced many new concepts; the mathematics was difficult and new to the engineer; many demonstrations were of an existence-proof nature; the key results were far from intuitive; the theory seemed to be without foreseeable practical applications. Indeed, many experienced engineers of that time, men who had contributed greatly to the existing technology, questioned the validity of some parts of the theory and certainly many openly resented the extravagant press it was receiving.