President's letter to the ACM membership

I was extremely well impressed with the size and quality of the Fall Joint Computer Conference in Las Vegas. The physical accommodations were excellent, and the number of attendees was reported as well over 4000. The program and exhibits were very good indeed, and covered a wide variety of topics. As a numerical analyst, however , I am a little sad at the scarcity of papers dealing with scientific computation. Very conspicuous at the FJCC were references to Education and the role of computing. The members of the Epilogue session predicted that future meetings would see a large increase in papers dealing with Education. Dr. Gerard of the University of California's new Irvine campus painted the most glowing picture of the future role of computing in University education. For one thing, these will provide the mechanism to replace the current method of educating students by batch-processing! Dr. Gerard sees three major events in the intellectual history of Man: (1) the development of symbols (speech) ; (2) the development of tested symbols (science); (3) the development of mental prostheses (computers). The meeting of the ACM Council with our chapter chairmen was a happy one, relatively free of the complaints which have marked earlier meetings. I believe that Don Madden and the Headquarters staff have vastly improved relations between officers and membership. The most significant discussions in the ACM Council dealt with how ACM should interface with other organizations in the computing field. For example, the Computer Personnel Research Group (CPRG) is discussing a liaison with ACM. Not all the members of CPRG are ACM members, and some might never want to join ACM as they are psychologists and personnel people. Our By-Iaws now provide that members of our Special Interest Groups must be members of ACM (at least after one year). The problem is: should ACM be more liberal about this Membership Bylaw, to facilitate affiliation with CPRG, or should we insist that ACM membership be a condition of any formal affiliation? The question is not easy, but it is very important. As computing pervades our whoie technological civilization, ACM would hope to receive many overtures like that of CPRG. If we can create mutually acceptable forms of liaison, ACM can exert the broad influence that it should on the applications of computing. If we fail in this, we will remain a body of pure computer types, able to concentrate on …