ACM: The Association for Computing Machinery

Zusammenfassung

The ACM has been computing’s premier professional society since its founding on September 15, 1947 — before most universities had computer science departments, before “software” had a name, and before anyone knew what a computing profession would look like. It created the Turing Award (computing’s Nobel), organized SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, SIGOPS and dozens of other research communities, and published the journals that defined what the field knew about itself. The ACM was founded by mathematicians with a practical problem and grew into an institution that shaped how computing understood its own intellectual history.

Founding: A Meeting at Columbia (1947)

The ACM was established at Columbia University in New York City on September 15, 1947, two years after the end of World War II and two years before the first stored-program computers became operational. The meeting was organized by John H. Curtiss, chief of the Mathematical Tables and Numerical Analysis section at the National Bureau of Standards, and Edmund C. Berkeley, an actuarial mathematician at Prudential Insurance who had become fascinated by electronic calculating machines.

The group that gathered was heterogeneous: mathematicians, engineers, statisticians, and early practitioners who had worked on the ENIAC project, on ballistics calculations, or on wartime operations research. They shared a practical problem: they were using or building computing machines, had no professional organization, no journal, and no systematic way to exchange information with each other.

John H. Curtiss became ACM’s first president, serving from 1947 to 1948. Curtiss understood computing primarily as a tool for applied mathematics — his NBS work focused on numerical methods and the calculation of mathematical tables. This early orientation toward computation as applied mathematics shaped ACM’s character in its first decade: more mathematical than engineering, more academic than industrial.

Edmund C. Berkeley served as ACM’s first secretary and was its public voice in the early years. He was an unusual figure — a computing enthusiast who wrote Giant Brains, or Machines That Think (1949), one of the first popular books about computers, while simultaneously building simple relay computers in his workshop and organizing the ACM’s administrative infrastructure. Berkeley’s vision was more democratic and more excited about computing’s social implications than the academic orientation that eventually dominated the organization.

The name “Association for Computing Machinery” was deliberately chosen to avoid the word “computer,” which in 1947 referred to a human being — a person who computed — rather than a machine. “Computing Machinery” meant the machines themselves. Within a decade, as electronic computers became the dominant meaning of “computer,” the original distinction faded, and ACM’s name became slightly paradoxical: an association for the machinery, run by the people.

Communications of the ACM (1958)

ACM published a newsletter (ACM Bulletin) from its founding, but its flagship publication, the Communications of the ACM (CACM), began in 1958. The first editor was Alan J. Perlis, then at Carnegie Mellon, who shaped CACM into the field’s premier general-interest journal.

CACM under Perlis and successive editors published landmark papers that are now canonical: Dijkstra’s “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” (1968, as a letter to the editor), C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare’s Quicksort (Algorithm 64, 1961) and his axiomatic basis for programming (1969), and many others. CACM occupied an unusual position: rigorous enough for researchers, broad enough for practitioners, and widely read at a time when it was one of the few reliable sources of technical computing information.

The ACM Digital Library, launched in the 1990s and expanded continuously since, eventually digitized CACM’s full history and ACM’s conference proceedings — creating one of the most comprehensive archives of computing research ever assembled.

The Turing Award (1966–Present)

The Turing Award is ACM’s most consequential institutional creation. Proposed by Alan Perlis and named for Alan Turing — whose work on computability, the Turing machine, and the theoretical foundations of computing occurred before the ACM existed — the award was first given in 1966.

Alan J. Perlis was the inaugural recipient, recognized for his influence on programming languages, compilers, and computer science education. Subsequent recipients read as a canon of foundational computing: Perlis (1966), Maurice Wilkes (1967), Richard Hamming (1968), Marvin Minsky (1969), James Wilkinson (1970), John McCarthy (1971), Edsger Dijkstra (1972), Charles Bachman (1973), Donald Knuth (1974), Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (1975, joint).

The award carried no cash in its first decades — recognition and a plaque. Google funded a $250,000 prize beginning in 2007, which rose to $1,000,000 in 2014. The cash infusion brought the Turing Award into parity with the Nobel Prize’s financial scale and substantially increased its public visibility, though it remains largely unknown outside computing.

Notable landmarks in the award’s history:

First joint award: Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (1975) — recognized their work on artificial intelligence and cognitive science together
Frances Allen (2006): first woman to receive the Turing Award, for her pioneering work on compilers and program optimization at IBM Research
Barbara Liskov (2008): recognized for her work on data abstraction, the Liskov substitution principle, and the CLU programming language
Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio (2018, joint): the “deep learning trio,” recognized for conceptual foundations of deep neural networks

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The Turing Award has been criticized for its demographic skew: as of 2024, only three women have received it in its nearly sixty-year history — Frances Allen (2006), Barbara Liskov (2008), and Shafi Goldwasser (2012). The award has also skewed heavily American and European, reflecting both where computing research was concentrated and the ACM’s membership base.

Special Interest Groups: The Real ACM

The ACM’s most operationally significant structure is its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), each organizing a research subfield. There are about 35 SIGs, ranging from the very large to the specialized:

SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) organizes the annual SIGGRAPH conference, which has been the world’s largest and most prestigious venue for computer graphics and interactive techniques since the 1970s. SIGGRAPH conferences are unusual among computing venues: they are simultaneously research conferences, artist showcases, and industry exhibitions, blending academic papers with animated films, real-time demonstrations, and commercial technology. The first SIGGRAPH conference, held in Boulder in 1974, opened a venue that would carry foundational graphics research — including the recursive subdivision and texture mapping that Ed Catmull pioneered in his 1974 Utah PhD thesis — into both research and entertainment computing. (Catmull’s better-known subdivision surfaces, the Catmull–Clark scheme, came later, in 1978.)

SIGPLAN (Programming Languages) organizes PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation), POPL (Principles of Programming Languages), and OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications) — the venues where most fundamental programming language research appears.

SIGOPS (Operating Systems) organizes SOSP (Symposium on Operating Systems Principles) and OSDI (Operating Systems Design and Implementation), the venues where landmark systems papers appear: the Unix paper, Mach, Plan 9, Exokernel, MapReduce, and the major cloud systems papers all appeared in SIGOPS venues.

SIGCOMM (Communications) organizes the networking research community, with the annual SIGCOMM conference as its flagship.

SIGKDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) expanded dramatically during the data science era, with the KDD conference becoming one of the field’s largest.

SIGCSE (Computer Science Education) is unusual among SIGs in focusing on pedagogy rather than research — it addresses how CS is taught at all levels and has become increasingly influential as computing education has expanded globally.

ACM’s International Presence

ACM is nominally an American organization — founded in the US, headquartered in New York — but operates globally. Its international presence operates through three structures:

National chapters exist in most major countries, providing local programming, networking, and connections to national computing communities. The ACM India Council is one of the most active, reflecting India’s large computing population and the numerous Indian computing professionals who joined ACM through academic and professional exposure to American computing culture. The German Chapter of the ACM, founded in 1968 by Albert Endres, is one of the oldest national chapters and notably predates the Gesellschaft für Informatik by one year — making it Germany’s oldest computing professional society; it has operated continuously since founding and since 2004 runs 34 regional groups jointly with the GI. A full history is in German Chapter of the ACM.

Student chapters operate at over 2,500 universities worldwide, making ACM present in university computing departments from Lagos to Lahore. Student chapters organize programming competitions, technical talks, and career events; for many computing students in countries without strong national computing societies, the ACM student chapter is their primary professional community.

ACM-W (ACM’s Women in Computing initiative) organizes programs to support women in computing globally, including the Athena Lecturer Award for senior women researchers and regional celebrations events that have grown into major gathering points for women in the field.

ACM Europe has grown in significance as European computing research has matured, and the ACM Europe Council advocates for European computing interests within the global ACM structure.

ACM’s relationship to IEEE Computer Society is fundamentally cooperative: both publish, both organize conferences, and ACM/IEEE joint conferences (such as SC for supercomputing and DAC for design automation) are among the field’s most important. The historical division — ACM as academic, IEEE as engineering-and-standards — has blurred as computing has become both more academic and more engineering-intensive.

The Professionalism Question

One recurring debate throughout ACM’s history: should it push for computing as a licensed profession, requiring certification as a precondition for practice, analogous to engineering licenses or medical board certification?

ACM’s answer has historically been ambivalent. The organization created curricula, published educational guidelines, and offered certification programs, but consistently stopped short of advocating for mandatory licensing of software practitioners. The reasons are structural: computing is too diverse (the same activity encompasses children programming Scratch and teams building safety-critical aviation software), too fast-changing for any fixed curriculum to remain current, and too distributed across industries to be regulated through a single professional body.

The question resurfaces whenever a high-profile software failure causes public harm — and it is increasingly acute as software controls physical systems in vehicles, medical devices, and infrastructure. ACM’s 1992 Code of Ethics and subsequent revisions articulate professional obligations without enforcement mechanisms — a statement of aspiration rather than a regulatory instrument.

ACM Today

ACM in the 2020s is a large, financially stable organization with approximately 100,000 members in 190 countries, an endowment that funds research awards and fellowships, and a digital library containing millions of articles. Its annual revenue exceeds $100 million, mostly from conference and publication activities.

The challenges it faces are structural: open access has eroded the financial model based on journal subscriptions and conference proceedings; online communities increasingly satisfy professional networking needs; and the most engaged computing communities organize around specific technologies rather than around a general professional association.

ACM has responded by accelerating its open access transition, partnering with industry on research programs, and expanding its educational initiatives. Whether an organization founded to share information among practitioners using card-calculating machines can reinvent itself for a computing culture organized around GitHub repositories and YouTube tutorials is the central institutional question of ACM’s second half-century.