To Our Readers

By BRUCE HALLETT/PRESIDENT

TIME has stood witness to the greater part of the most remarkable century in history. Perhaps more than any other publication, it has watched, wept and sung about the extraordinary people and events of the past 75 years. This week, as we celebrate our birthday, we pay tribute not only to those people and events but also to the varied, vivid form they have taken in our pages.

Part of the celebration is the issue you hold in your hands. In a special 62-page feature, we look back, notably through an extensive sampling of the major stories we have run over the past 7 1/2 decades (all excerpted but with their distinctive wording unchanged). We also look ahead, with an Essay in which managing editor Walter Isaacson projects our core values into the digital future.

Another part of the festivities is a gala dinner we are hosting this week at Radio City Music Hall, across the street from our New York City offices. More than 100 former cover subjects, including President and Mrs. Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Steven Spielberg, Bill Gates and Muhammad Ali, have accepted our invitation to an evening that we trust will be as stimulating as the guest list. (CNN will televise a special on TIME at 75 this Sunday, March 8, at 10 p.m. E.T.)

Two people who will be at the party in spirit only are Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, who started this magazine in March 1923. It goes without saying that Hadden and Luce were enormously smart and able. What is rarely said is that at that moment 75 years ago, they were so very young. That's what surprises--and inspires--me about them: their youth. On the date of Vol. I, No. 1, Hadden was 25 and Luce 24. As they assembled their 32-page magazine in offices at 9 East 40th Street--their equivalent, you might say, of the garage in Los Altos, Calif., where some 50 years later Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built what came to be called the personal computer--the two brought to life an idea that was as original as it was immature: the idea of a newsmagazine.

Like the ideas that dominate the cyberindustry today, TIME was never about information per se. It was about organizing it in ways that would enable curious people to get to it easily and quickly. Think of TIME as a pioneering version of a Web browser. And think of Luce and Hadden as the world's first cyberstars.

TIME wasn't born grownup and mature as it is today, although it's hard not to think of it that way. It was born in the abounding ambition of youthful dreams. All of us who work here want to be enlivened--and emboldened--by that spirit today, as we embark on the magazine's 76th year.