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