Interactions - March/April 2010

EDITOR Jonathan Grudin jgrudin@microsoft.com

User experience was a central concern. The 1951
conference may have been the first computer con-
ference with published proceedings. Subsequent
joint conferences met twice most years from 1953
to 1972, then annually as the National Computer
Conference (NCC) from 1973 to 1988. After that, we
gathered in specialized conferences to describe our
wonderful critters, what we wished we had done
differently, and how “we are going to fix that in our
new model.”
Researchers of that era focused on journal pub-
lication, but papers contributed by major figures
in computer science were published at these “must
attend” conferences. This included oft-cited work
by people who inspired and contributed to human-
computer interaction. In our rapidly evolving field,
one need not study history, but to get a sense of
where current trajectories might take us, it can be
useful to know how past trajectories ended, and
what has remained constant over time.

what if “parents” appeared with an attorney at their side? Congress had considered facilitating the publication of orphaned works, but pulled back. Some might have significant commercial value, but conference papers from half a century ago were not among them.

The great news is that ACM has scanned an almost complete set of the proceedings, covering most of the years from 1951 to 1984. We are reconnected to a large piece of our history! The documents are available as digital library conference proceedings at http://portal.acm.org/proceed-ings/afips/. Not yet online are the AFIPS Office Automation Conference (OAC) proceedings from the 1980s, which include, for example, papers by Douglas Engelbart and one by Irene Greif describing the private symposium for which the term “ computer supported cooperative work” was coined. (ACM plans to add the remaining volumes when accessible copies are located.)

An Orphan Finds a Home

AFIPS was large and prosperous. So much so that it built multimillion-dollar headquarters. Then AFIPS collapsed. In 1990, its records and collections were hauled to a dump. Four years ago, I asked “To whom, if anyone, did AFIPS grant copyright ownership of its books, magazines, and especially the proceedings of the joint and national computer conferences?” Neither ACM nor IEEE had a record of it. At one point near the end, AFIPS arranged with Springer to publish one of its journals, but Springer could find no pertinent records. A warehouse fire was mentioned. I tracked down AFIPS officers from that period, now in retirement; none had definitive recollections.

Why did I care? In the absence of a copyright owner, it could be risky to publish “orphaned” works that were influential in our early history—

History Lessons

A systematic survey of AFIPS contributions to computer science and HCI could be the basis for another article. With several volumes still missing, the proceedings include papers by a majority of the 55 Turing Awards winners. (Many of those who are not represented worked abroad.) This includes sin-gle-authored papers by 22 Turing Award winners, including Engelbart, Fred Brooks, Ed Feigenbaum, Alan Kay, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Herb Simon, Ivan Sutherland, and others influential in HCI and related disciplines.