The first topical meeting on Photonic Switching was held March 18-20, 1987 in Incline Village, Nev., USA in conjunction with the second topical meeting on Optical Computing. It was sponsored by the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society and the Optical Society of America with the co­ operation of the IEEE Communications Society. The attendance at these meetings was well in excess of 500 persons - a measure of the growing worldwide interest in optical techniques for switching and signal process­ ing. Our goal in organizing the Photonic Switching meeting was to provide a forum for the presentation of original papers on the subjects of devices and