B Y JACQUES COHEN
EIC YEARS OCTOBER 1992–DECEMBER 1996
FROM ACADEMIA TO
THE EDITORSHIP
Communications has always had a special meaning to me since the beginning of my
career, both professionally and personally. My fascination with computers started in the
late 1950s when I was pursuing my doctoral degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign. The Illiac-I was among the early computers built in the U.S. and I had the
privilege to use it extensively in my dissertation.
The experience with the Illiac-I changed
my life. After undergoing the exhilaration
of having my programmed instructions
executed at lightning speed—it was milliseconds in those days!—I was convinced that
computers would profoundly affect science and
engineering. To me, it seemed mandatory to take
part in helping propagate the use of computers.
I became a member of the ACM in the early
1960s, and read the monthly issues of
Communications avidly. At the time, the term “Association
for Computing Machinery” was appropriate, and
the articles published in CACM reflected developments in mechanical, analog, and digital computations.
In 1967, when I was doing research at the University of Grenoble, France, I had my first paper
published in CACM. It was actually the cover
article, which contained what is now known as
execution profiles. The impact of this first article
in the computing community was immediate;
many of the outstanding computer experts bombarded me with questions about details of the
techniques I had used. It was obvious then that
CACM was already the premier publication of
computer specialists.
In 1968, after a stint at MIT, I became assistant professor at Brandeis University. Undoubt-
edly, having several articles published in CACM
and other ACM publications counted significantly toward my promotions to higher echelons
in academia. Some of these articles were coauthored with my talented undergraduate students who gained invaluable experience in
participating in my research; they also witnessed
first-hand the efforts needed to have a paper published in a top academic journal.
I recall that during the 1970s one could hope
to understand the material in CACM from cover
to cover, even though the corpus of knowledge in
computers was growing fast. Throughout both
that decade and the next, CACM continued publishing major research articles that detailed the
gems of achievements in computer science. Since
then, the field has mushroomed, and specialization has become a must. The establishment of
ACM Journals and Transactions dealing with
specialized topics followed this trend. It was then
essential to screen out the articles submitted to
CACM that were more appropriate to other journals so as to achieve a balance that promoted the
work done in many areas of computer science.
This was no easy task and I am sure that many
worthy articles did not make it to the pages of
CACM.
In the early years ACM depended heavily on
