and 184 conferences, symposia,
workshops, expositions, and general meetings through early 1986.
Clearly, a lot was going on in
1985 and CACM was keeping
readers up to date on what that
was. Perhaps today the academic
appointment market is not quite
as brisk as it was, but there are
still many conferences, expositions and, yes, meetings.
Like analyzing dinosaur bones,
sampling one edition of a magazine with a history as long as
Communications of the ACM in a
discipline with a history as short as
software engineering only provides
a snapshot of what is an evolutionary process. The business of software and CACM (and to some
extent myself personally) have
grown up together. Whenever we
grow and evolve, we can always
look back a few years and see ideas
and approaches that seem dated
and strange now. But we can also
see things that truly communicated
what was going on at that time in
our profession, located our knowledge in a pertinent, topical, and
readable form and also pointed to
the future of our profession.
It is interesting and instructive
to look back and see where we’ve
come from. But it’s even more
interesting to ponder what is coming, and it is good to know that,
whatever it is, Communications of
the ACM will be there communicating it to us. c
PHILLIP G. ARMOUR
( armour@corvusintl.com) is a senior consultant
at Corvus International Inc., Deer Park, IL.
© 2008 ACM 0001-0782/08/0100 $5.00
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM January 2008/Vol. 51, No. 1
