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essential and inevitable that their professional identity as computer sci-
entists would be constructed around a solid foundation of theoretical
knowledge.
Such academically minded individuals were naturally drawn to the
ACM. The ACM had been founded in 1947 by MIT professor Samuel
Caldwell. Although as its name implies the ACM had been established
with computing machinery in mind, by the early 1950s it had distanced
itself from the more engineering-oriented aspects of computing in favor
of the “other phases” of computing, including numerical analysis, logical
design, and programming. 43 As will be discussed further in chapter 7,
the ACM deliberately styled itself an as academic organization; its annual
meetings resembled academic conferences, with published proceedings,
and the articles in its journals, the fi rst of which appeared in 1953, were
peer reviewed, highly technical, and generally theoretically oriented.
Many of the original members either were or had been associated with
a major university computation project, and most were university edu-
cated. The ACM was the fi rst computing association to impose educa-
tional standards on its members, develop standardized computer science
curricula, and join national scientifi c organizations such as the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy
of Sciences. Almost half of the institutional members of the ACM were
educational organizations, and after 1962 a thriving student membership
program was developed. In 1966, the ACM established the prestigious
Turing Award, which remains to this day the highest academic honor
awarded in computer science. The ACM clearly attracted those comput-
ing specialists most invested in a particular vision of computer science
in which the “sole abstract purpose of advancing truth and knowledge”
remained primary. 44
Of course, it was not enough for computer scientists to call themselves
scientists. Although by the early 1960s the term computer science was
being used widely within both academia and industry to describe the
formal study of computing, the broader recognition of computer science
as a legitimate science had yet to be established. 45 The elevation of uni-
versity computing centers to departments of computer science did not
necessarily change the widespread perception that computing was still
essentially a service activity. “Any fi eld that has the word science in its
name,” argued the mathematician Frank Harary, “is guaranteed thereby
not to be a science.” 46 The historical association of computing with low-
skilled, feminized labor did nothing to improve this perception, nor did
the more recent dominance by the technology of the electronic computer.
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