Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
tradition.”
28
Articles were peer-reviewed, and every attempt was made
to maintain rigorous academic standards.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the ACM continued to cultivate its
relationship with the academic community. In 1954 it accepted an invita-
tion to apply for membership in the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. Since 1958 the ACM has been represented in
the Mathematical Sciences Division of the National Academy of Sciences
National Research Council. In 1962 it affi liated with the Conference
Board of the Mathematical Sciences, which also consisted of the American
Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, the
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics. In 1966 the ACM established the prestigious
Turing Award, the highest honor awarded in computer science. Almost
half of the institutional members of the ACM were educational organiza-
tions, and after 1962 a thriving student membership program was
developed.
29
The close association that the ACM maintained with the academic
computer scientist proved a mixed blessing, however. Although the
ACM was able to maintain a relatively high profi le within scientifi c
and mathematical circles, it was often castigated by the business com-
munity. Many business programmers looked on the ACM as “a sort
of holier than thou academic intellectual sort of enterprise—not
inclined to be messing around with the garbage that comptrollers worry
about,” and the ACM leadership was characterized as “a bunch of guys
with their heads in the clouds worrying about Tchebysheff polynomials
and things like that.”
30
“These four-year computer science wonders are
infi nitely better equipped to design a new compiler than they are to
manage a software development project. We don't need new compilers.
We need on-time, on-budget, software development.”
31
A
Datamation
article from 1963 titled “The Cost of Professionalism” warned that the
members of the ACM had to “decide whether it's worth that much to
belong to an organization which many feel has been dominated by—and
catered pretty much to—Ph.D. mathematicians. . . . [T]he Association
tends to look down its nose at business data processing types while
claiming to represent the whole, wide wonderful world of computing.”
32
A Diebold Group publication from 1966 characterized the ACM as a
group “whose interests are primarily academic and which is helpful to
those with scholastic backgrounds, theoreticians of methodology, scien-
tifi c programmers and software people.” Although the ACM president
