Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
professional position, and they struggled to prove that they possessed a
unique set of skills and training that allowed them to lay claim to profes-
sional autonomy.
The Association for Computing Machinery
On January 10, 1947, at the Symposium on Large-Scale Digital
Calculating Machinery at the Harvard Computation Laboratory,
Professor Samuel Caldwell of MIT proposed to a crowd of more than
three hundred the formation of a new association of those interested in
computing machinery. His proposal obviously landed on fertile soil:
within six months a “Notice on the Organization of an Eastern
Association for Computing Machinery” was circulating within the com-
puting community, and in September the fi rst meeting of the Eastern
Association for Computing Machinery was held at Columbia University.
Seventy-eight individuals attended. Offi cers were elected, and the
Executive Council was appointed. A second meeting, held in December
at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Aberdeen, Maryland, attracted three
hundred participants. The next year the organization dropped the word
Eastern from its title, and was thereafter known simply as the Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM).
During the 1950s the ACM grew steadily but not spectacularly. By
1951 there were 1,113 members, including 43 in other countries; in 1956
the total had risen to 2,305, and by 1959 it had reached 5,254. In the
1960s, the membership grew somewhat more slowly, and there were a
few periods during which the total number of members actually decreased.
Overall, though, the ACM continued to expand at a rate of about 16
percent annually. By the end of 1969 there were 22,761 regular members.
Figure 7.2 shows the annual membership statistics for the years 1947
to 1972.
From its inception, the ACM styled itself as an academically oriented
organization. Many of the original members either were or had been
associated with a major university computation project, and most were
university educated, including a number at the graduate level. The focus
of the organization's early activities was a series of national conferences,
the fi rst of which was cosponsored by the Institute for Numerical Analysis
at the University of California at Los Angeles. These meetings repre-
sented an outgrowth of an earlier series of university-sponsored confer-
ences, and they retained an academic fl avor. Many were low-budget
affairs held at universities or research institutions, and they frequently
