Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
IFIP had been established several years earlier under the aegis of the
United Nations Educational, Scientifi c, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO). Beginning in 1959, IFIP hosted an annual international
conference on computing. Each member nation was allowed to send
representatives from a
single
organization. Since the United States had
no single organization that spoke for its computing community, AFIPS
was created to represent three of the largest computer-related societies:
the ACM, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), and the
Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). (The AIEE and the IRE later merged
into the IEEE.) It was hoped that AFIPS would eventually come to
serve as the single national voice for computer interests in the United
States.
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From the start, AFIPS proved a disappointment. AFIPS did represent
the United States at the annual IFIP meeting. It was given control over
the lucrative Joint Computer Conferences, but beyond that, it proved
incapable of serving as “the voice of the computing profession in
America.”
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It was crippled by a weak charter and a lack of tangible
support from its founding societies. AFIPS was a society of societies, not
a society of members, and it was therefore dependent on and subservient
to the interests of its constituent societies, rather than to the larger com-
puting community. In addition, several obvious candidates for member-
ship, including the DPMA, had been conspicuously excluded from
participation, and the AFIPS voting structure made it obvious that addi-
tional members would be unwelcome.
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Even more limiting was a clause
in the constitution, insisted on by the ACM as an essential precondition
for its support, prohibiting AFIPS from placing itself “in direct competi-
tion with the activities of its member societies.”
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Although the constitu-
tion was revised in 1969 to provide for stronger leadership and a more
inclusive atmosphere, AFIPS continued to struggle for support and rec-
ognition. The DPMA did not join until 1974, for example, and even then
without much enthusiasm. The gathering in 1975 of the computing elite
at the Quality Inn in Anaheim represented one of the many attempts to
reinvigorate interest in this ailing association. In 1989, just two years
after celebrating its twenty-fi fth anniversary, AFIPS voted itself out of
existence. The loss of control over the lucrative National Computing
Conferences left it fi nancially unstable and without any clear means of
support. Few in the community mourned its passing.
The transcripts of the meeting are revealing. The existence of a power-
ful professional association was obviously considered by the many infl u-
ential members of the computing community to be the cornerstone of a
