This magazine took flight during a drilling and investing boom with the unique premise that it would link the E&P and financial worlds, and say more about play opportunities and deal-making than technology. Now here we are, 25 years on, and in the midst of another boom-only this time, return on capital employed has replaced "Freeze a Yankee in the Dark" bumper stickers. That sea change has led to a buzz of buy and sell activity, mergers, decision-making software and closer attention to investor needs. It's a long way from the early 1980s, when we explained what a geologist does, and which public drilling and income funds were hot. During the tough times in the mid-1980s, when used mid-depth land rigs brought less than a dime on the dollar at auction, we wrote about survival and suffered a few layoffs ourselves. Today, rigs are worth their weight in gold. In the early 1990s, the use of 3-D seismic data and horizontal drilling were ground-breaking technologies that swept the industry, sparking several exciting new plays and reviving others. Remember the Horseshoe Atoll in West Texas, the Austin Chalk in central Texas, the Lobo? Today, we have a cell phone, a laptop and a Blackberry, and we hear about multi-stage fracs, intelligent wells, the downhole Internet and the digital oil field, subsea completions and oil-water separation. This summer, some ethanol companies will go public-the next wave of energy investment. For more on this, see the July issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-260-6441.

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