Daily Tech History: October 14, 1957 — The British Computer Society Is Incorporated

On October 14, 1957, the British Computer Society was formally incorporated as “The British Computer Society Ltd,” becoming one of the world’s first professional bodies dedicated entirely to the emerging field of computing. Its founder and first president was Sir Maurice Wilkes, the Cambridge computer scientist best known for building the EDSAC, one of the earliest stored-program computers.

The society grew out of the London Computer Group, a hobbyist and professional club formed in 1956 as computers were still a rare, room-sized novelty mostly found in universities and government labs. A year later, that group merged with a separate association of scientists to create the organization that would become the BCS. At a time when “computing” wasn’t yet a recognized profession or academic discipline in its own right, the society gave engineers, mathematicians, and early programmers a shared home to exchange ideas and set standards for a field that was still inventing its own vocabulary.

The BCS has outlasted the hardware era it was born into by evolving along with the industry. It picked up charitable status in 1966, was granted a Royal Charter in 1984, and rebranded in 2009 as “BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT” — still active today as a professional and accreditation body for IT workers across the UK.

Source: Wikipedia: British Computer Society

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.