BY ROBERT L. ASHENHURST
EIC YEARS APRIL 1973–JANUARY 1983
THE BATTLE BEHIND
THE SCENES
Like Stuart Lynn, I had been a department editor for CACM before becoming its EIC.
In fact, the “Computer Systems” department was initiated by Kelly Gotlieb during his
editorship. He sent me a letter enclosing a submitted paper that he thought should be
published in CACM; however, it fit no existing department. It would appear in the September 1965 issue: Reilly and Federighi’s “On Reversible Subroutines and Computers
that Run Backwards.” A subsequent contribution, of considerably more lasting significance, was published in that same issue: E.W. Dijkstra’s “Solution of a Problem in Concurrent Program Control.” Indeed, the paper initiated a whole new subdiscipline in the
computer operating systems area. Eventually, “Computer Systems” became the department for software/hardware systems papers such as those that now appear in
Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS).
Stuart has chosen to call his reminiscence
“The Battle of the Covers.” Mine is appropriately titled “The Battle Behind the
Scenes” (I eschew the expression “Under the
Covers,” used by Ted Codd to describe relational
database infrastructure, since CACM is a family
publication, sort of ). Researchers in programming
languages and other disciplines liked CACM as it
was—a vehicle for presenting their research
results, one that was appropriately refereed but
also widely read (or at least widely circulated), as
the publication was distributed to all ACM members. At the same time, practitioners in computing
felt its articles were arcane and basically unreadable; they resented having to receive it.
During that time, several Transactions were
created as spin-offs for researchers in specific
domains—first Transactions on Mathematical
Software (TOMS), then Transactions on Database
Systems (TODS), Transactions on Programming
Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Transactions on
Computer Systems (TOCS), and many others.
These publications attracted papers in some of
the central research areas in computing, even
without the wide circulation of CACM, and it
was felt the departments that remained would
not be sufficiently focused to support the less-central research topics. Thus, the ACM Publications Board proceeded apace with a plan for a
“new” CACM as described briefly by Stuart (to
avoid stepping on any toes, let me call this the
“old new” CACM to contrast it with the various
“newer new” versions generated subsequently).
While this long-range solution was being formulated, however, we mounted a number of
short-range efforts to address some of the discontent among ACM’s practitioner members. We
added a specially edited “Computing Practices”
section, with contributions reviewed, but not refereed, by research standards. As noted by my fellow editors, we used the acronym JAM—Journal
for All Members—in discussing these matters. I
