“A Hop, Skip and Jump” A Personal Journey Down SIGCSE Memory Lane

meetings with colleagues at their offices, etc. We learned that patience really was a virtue! The one constant was that our colleagues, and people in general, were open and eager to develop relationships that transcended politics. SIGCSE was/is one such vehicle to overcome artificial barriers.

We mostly stayed in campsites and visited as many universities as possible. In Eastern Europe we were fortunate to visit colleagues teaching computer science at universities in Hungary, Rumania, (then)

Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria including Professors Boyan Penkov in Sofia, and Michal Chytil in Prague. Subsequently, I visited both of them giving lectures and discussing both SIGCSE and mutual research interests. I know that many of you have had similar experiences (perhaps without the camping aspect!) and have not only made numerous international friends but contacts for your departments and universities. Some of you have also shared mutual research interests that resulted in joint papers and collaborative research projects.

SIGCSE BULLETIN

The Bulletin has been the mainstay and lifeline for communicating among our members—particularly in the early days. The Calendar of Events was our only means for providing members with the latest information on key dates and places for upcoming events. The Bulletin also included Letters to the Editor, papers on current topics (often courses and curriculum) as well as observations from the Chair and Editor regarding items/topics of special interest. When I took over as Editor in 1969 (with Vol. 1 #3) we typed each issue on special mats. I hired undergraduates to do the typing and for four years we typed, edited and mailed the masters to ACM headquarters. Our ACM liaison then organized the printing and mailing. Irene Hollister, Bridget Gann and Fred Aaronson were among those at ACM HQ who were of tremendous assistance in our early days. It normally took 4–6 weeks from when we began typing and putting an issue together until our members received it. The issues were usually 20+ pages with several of them approaching 50 pages! We published three regular issues of the Bulletin per year plus the Proceedings as a fourth issue. It took numerous hours to put together an issue since any typing mistakes had to be painstakingly fixed, all graphs, etc. had to be hand drawn and fact checking was quite time consuming. Moving this process to a computer-based system was a HUGE plus!

John Impagliazzo was kind enough to send me some memories of when he took over the editing of the Bulletin in 1997.

I quote from a recent note from him. “When I inherited the
SIGCSE Bulletin from Jim Miller, he gave me two boxes of re-
pro paper to mount articles, images, and the like. I figured it
was time to throw out the old and ring in the new. So, I guess
support), in collaboration with the IEEE Computer Society, formed
the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) in 1984.

A key point in making SIGCSE successful was the recognition that the Bulletin and proceedings were its foundation.

They were central in keeping SIGCSE members informed and up-to-date, as well as providing a forum for exchanging ideas and publishing CS education research. With that in mind we also knew that our biggest cost was producing and mailing the Proceedings of the Technical Symposium to all the members as part of their dues. Our goal was to operate on a “break-even” basis yet continue to include the Proceedings as one of the four Bulletin issues. (Those members who attended the symposia thus received two copies though when they registered they were given the option of foregoing their second copy.) We were able to maintain this “balance” though the parameters changed when the Bulletin went on-line, and Inroads was established.

PROMOTING SIGCSE

As early as the 25th ACM National Conference in September 1970, SIGCSE had an active and visible presence sponsoring five sessions [ 4].

1. General Education in Computer Science

2. Undergraduate Education in Computer Science

3. Graduate Programs in Computer Science

4. Organizing for Computer Science Education

5. Computer Science Education and Industry – A Dialogue
In addition, several members of SIGCSE participated in the
First International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
World Conference on Computer Education (Amsterdam,
1970) including yours truly. My primary purpose was to pres-
ent a paper describing SIGCSE and to encourage participants
from around the world to join and work with us. As noted in a
Bulletin article [ 5] summarizing papers presented at this con-
ference “SIGCSE is presented by Aiken. He reviews the organi-
zation accomplishments and goals and indicates a desire to see
One of the most rewarding aspects of attending this con-
ference was meeting leading European computer scientists
and learning how they were addressing many of the same is-
sues we were tackling in North America. A later highlight was
a two month trip my wife and I took in the summer of 1973
driving through Eastern Europe, Turkey, Greece and Italy. This
was during the “Cold War”—an era when it was often difficult
to accomplish tasks such as crossing borders, changing money,
getting necessary government approvals for vouchers, arranging

As early as the
25th ACM National
Conference
in September 1970,
SIGCSE had an
active and visible
presence sponsoring
five sessions.