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 ( hallmw@acm.org) is a professor in the
School of Computing at the University of Utah, Salt Lake
City, and the chair of ACm’s History Committee.