History of Electronic Engineering

The modern discipline of electronic engineering was to a large extent born out of radio and television development and from the large amount of Second World War development of defence systems and weapons. In the interwar years, the subject was known as radio engineering and it was only in the late 1950s that the term electronic engineering started to emerge. In the UK, the subject of electronic engineering became distinct from electrical engineering as a university degree subject around 1960. Students of electronics and related subjects like radio and telecommunications before this time had to enroll in the electrical engineering department of the university as no university had departments of electronics. Electrical engineering was the nearest subject with which electronic engineering could be aligned, although the similarities in subjects covered (except mathematics and electromagnetism) lasted only for the first year of the three-year course.