On September 15, 1947, a group of computing pioneers met at Columbia University in New York and founded the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery — the organization we know today as the ACM. The meeting was organized by mathematician Edmund C. Berkeley, and the founders included John Mauchly, co-designer of ENIAC. Their stated goal was to advance the science and application of the new machines for computing and handling information.
Timing mattered. Electronic computers were barely out of the wartime lab in 1947, and the few people who understood them were scattered across universities, government projects and a handful of companies. Earlier that year there had been a Harvard symposium on large-scale calculating machinery and lecture series at MIT and in New York, which showed there was a community looking for a home. The “Eastern” part of the name didn’t last long: it was dropped in January 1948 as the group’s ambitions went national.
Nearly eight decades later, the ACM is the world’s largest computing society, with roughly 110,000 members. It publishes Communications of the ACM and the Journal of the ACM, runs a large share of the field’s major conferences, and awards the A.M. Turing Award, often described as the Nobel Prize of computing.
Source: Wikipedia – Association for Computing Machinery, The Story of Information
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