B Y MOSHE Y. VARDI
EIC YEARS
2008–
CACM: PAST, PRESENT,
AND FUTURE
The French adage “Plus ça change, plus c’est la m eme chose,” or, the more things change,
the more they stay the same, still rings true today. Reading over the essays of my prede-
cessors, one recognizes the thread that runs through all of them, which is the constant
need of CACM to reinvent itself. In fact, I discovered an April 24, 1964 report from a
Commission of Thoughtful Persons to the ACM Council that stated “It was felt that
Communications was becoming too much of a journal and that a re-evaluation is in order.”
I suspect this ongoing need to rethink CACM, a flagship publication for professionals
working in a fast-moving and ever-changing field, will stay with us for the foreseeable
future.
Icame of age as a computer
scientist in the late 1970s,
during my formative years as
a graduate student. I remember being highly influenced by
some great research articles published during CACM’s “
black-and-blue” years. E.F. Codd’s
paper, “A Relational Model of
Data for Large Shared Data
Banks” published in the June
1970 issue was given on Mt.
Sinai, from my perspective.
(1970 was felt to be in the dim
past for a graduate student in
1979.) It was clear upon its February 1978 publication that
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman’s
paper, “A Method for Obtaining
Digital Signature and Public-Key Cryptosystems,” was a seminal one. And in May 1979, De
Millo, Lipton, and Perlis’s
“Social Processes and Proofs of
Theorems and Programs” was
instantly controversial. (Indeed,
it still makes for interesting
reading today, though the
tremendous progress in formal-methods research has dulled its
edge.)
The essays here by Denning
and Cohen describe the changes
that CACM underwent during
the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996,
the ACM Publications Board
decided that CACM ought to
be largely run by professional
staff, guided by an advisory
board. When Cohen’s tenure as
EIC ended, the Board did not
appoint a new EIC.
In retrospect, eliminating the
position of CACM EIC and
