letter from acm’s history committee chair
DOI: 10.1145/2380656.2380657
Mary Hall
understanding acm’s Past
Computing is such a rapidly changing
field—one that is always looking ahead to
the next innovative technology—that little
attention has been paid to looking back
toward its origins. ACM was founded in

how do we gather
such stories to share
before it’s too late?

nal editors that can be found in the ACM Digital Archive and linked from our Web site.

If you are nearing retirement, you might be wondering what you should do with the correspondence, manuals, photos, and physical artifacts you have collected throughout your career. The items that are unique and of historical interest should be archived, but finding the pearls in an office full of boxes can be challenging. Our site offers guidelines on how to approach archiving your personal collection, which may help answer some of these questions.

Looking toward the future, a looming challenge in archiving computing history is that so much of the present is being created in the digital world, in email messages that use different mail programs, documents created by different software, and data in different formats. It may also be saved on media that has a short shelf life, for example, floppy disks from original PCs. Just being able to read these materials is technically challenging, but even more difficult is separating valuable information from the routine. How many email messages, even from Turing Awardees, are actually relevant to archiving computing history? This question of archiving electronic materials is one that will demand computing innovation not yet realized in order to examine and store our computing history.

Mary W. hall ( [e-mail]) is a professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the chair of ACm’s History Committee.