Birthdays are traditionally a time for celebration, but rather than start blowing our own trumpet, it seemed more appropriate to us to look at some of the successes that have taken place in the world of electronic music since E&MM first saw the light of day, three years ago this month.

Few people can have failed to notice the success achieved over the last year or two by musicians using electronics as a means to fulfil their artistic goals, whether their musical output has been the understated beauty of Jean Michael-Jarre, the unashamed splendour of Vangelis, or the uptempo pop of Heaven 17 and Depeche Mode.

Hand-in-hand with the success of artists using predominantly electronic musical instruments has come the upturn in fortunes of those companies involved in designing, manufacturing, distributing and marketing those instruments. Few people three years ago could have predicted the degree to which sales of electronic music hardware would rocket as a direct result of the music becoming accepted by the public, yet nowadays we tend to view such a dramatic change as something that was bound to have happened sooner or later.

As technology has leapt ahead, so the design of musical instruments and related equipment has leapt ahead also, with the result that digital and computer-related hardware has become increasingly accessible to the average musician, even if his means are never going to be anything but slender.

However, major manufacturing companies can never be all things to all men, and for those whose needs are not served by ready-built products, the past three years has seen increasing numbers of people taking hold of a soldering iron and getting a glimpse of technology at first-hand, and saving themselves a tidy sum in the process.

Nowhere is this now more true than in the world of personal microcomputers, where both hardware and software makers have been too preoccupied with the mass-market boom to focus on the needs of individual musicians, leaving the way clear for myriad groups of smaller companies and enthusiasts to make the most of the real advances in computer music - on both sides of the Atlantic.

Against this background, the success of E&MM over the past three years almost dwindles into insignificance, yet we still like to feel we've made an important contribution to the world of high-technology music-making, and we feel confident we can continue to do so.

Here's to the next three years...