Staying Connected

for telecom it wasn’t just the services they were providing that changed dramatically. Traditional carriers had to reinvent the business model toward one of enabling communication to where a person is rather than to a place he might be. Gargantuan companies had to compete with sleeker, more innovative players. Telecom players were forced to acquire smaller companies that could broaden their reach, broaden their menu of services. Soon they were trumpeting the triple and quadruple play—voice, video, data, and mobility.

Telecom’s metamorphosis in that short time is, of course, part of a bigger more steady change the industry has undergone over the past 50 years. It is especially relevant as we look back at CACM and celebrate the publication’s own anniversary. Interwoven with the progress and evolution of telecommunications is the progress and evolution of the computer. This intermingling between the two disciplines will only grow stronger. The role computers have played not only in telecom’s development but in society’s maturity brings us back to ACM and this publication.

THE COLUMBIA CONNECTION The origins of ACM sound almost quaint in retrospect, but the momentum one meeting created would help foster world change. Some 60 years ago, a bunch of folks interested in computing ideas expressed a desire to get together and exchange discov-

eries with their peers. It might be application techniques or standards that would be discussed or debated, but the way accomplished mathematician and CACM author Franz Alt described it in a column, it was more like just 78 people coming together at New York City’s Columbia University trying to grapple with new findings and hoping they’d meet other people as interested in the computing field, and in furthering the computer field, as they were.

Wonder if there was an awareness of the kind of frontier that lay ahead of those people as they filed into that prestigious building way back in 1947. They came up with a name for their organization, Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, and set about advancing the cause of computing. Of course, Eastern would later be dropped from the title and the group of interested folks from both the academic and professional worlds of computing would grow from 78 to today’s more than 80,000 members.

Only a year before the organization was formed, in 1946, the ENIAC or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, which derived from a military need to help soldiers determine settings on weapons, was developed. The deciphering was based on complex calculations that proved too time consuming for humans. While strategizing for the war, the calculator was being tinkered with at the University of Pennsylvania. The finished product stood

bloated with 19,000 vacuum tubes, tipped the scales at more than 30 tons, and used almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power each day, according to reports.

“By today’s standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster,” wrote Martin Weik of the Ballistic Research Laboratories at Aberdeen Proving Ground back in 1961. Still, the ENIAC became the prototype for most other modern computers. A 1958 report titled Defense Spending and the U.S. Economy that came from the operations research office of the John Hopkins University tagged it “the first modern electronic computer.”

In the early 1950s, again from a military need, IBM developed and distributed its own “defense calculator.” In 1953, 19 of these IBM machines, later renamed the “701” were sold, according to Chronology of Digital Computing Machines. Two of these units went to the defense department.

Within that next decade, academic science projects, also originating in part from defense contracts, would attract the attention of researchers. Plans for ARPA, or Advanced Research Projects Agency, had been laid. Some of the primary researchers involved learned of other scientists’ compatible work at an ACM conference held in 1967, according to reports. These projects would evolve into what we know now as the Internet.

The ACM had understood the need to record and review literature that bubbled from these