Much of the practice of ion chromatography (IC) today is well-established science transformed into easily practiced technology; little art remains. Since it was first described in 1975 (1), IC has matured rapidly. The number of articles on IC published in Analytical Chemistry reached a peak in the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, judging by the number of articles abstracted by Chemical Abstracts, IC is increasingly being applied to a wide variety of areas, U.S. manufacturers of IC instrumentation indicate that, despite the recession, worldwide sales of IC instrumentation are on the rise.The reliability of IC is often taken for granted. The technique has become a routine tool for process analysis and control, notably for trace analysis in the nuclear power and semiconductor industries. IC has become so widespread that details such as modifications of vendor-supplied software and merits of vendor service contracts have been published in peer-reviewed literature (.2).Currently there are not many vendors of IC columns, especially as compared with the large number of vendors for LC columns.