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Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 08:56:40 -0700
From: Paul McJones <paul@mcjones.org>
Subject: ACM History Committee
To: rts@cs.arizona.edu
Message-id: <4294A038.4050201@mcjones.org>
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Rick,

I recently learned that there is an ACM History Committee and that you 
are a co-chair. I ran across some slides 
(http://www.sde.org/msj/acm/HistoryComReport.pdf) that give me an idea 
of what your committee is interested in. I've been working for a few 
years as a volunteer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, 
CA, focussing on the history of software, and especially on how the 
Museum can collect, preserve, and present source code and other archival 
materials.  It occurred to me that we might be able to cooperate in 
certain ways.  For example, the slides I referenced above mention doing 
more oral histories, especially of Turing Award winners. The CHM also 
has an oral history series, so perhaps there could be some coordination. 
I've recently been doing a project to document the history of the 
original IBM 704 FORTRAN project -- see:

http://community.computerhistory.org/scc/projects/FORTRAN/

This has gotten the CHM trustees interested in doing an oral history of 
John Backus (who of course is an ACM Turing Award winner).

Another possible form of collaboration would be for the ACM to provide 
open access to key historic papers -- for example, we could link to them 
from our software collection web pages such as the FORTRAN web site 
mentioned above and the one I'm working on now for LISP:

http://community.computerhistory.org/scc/projects/LISP/

I welcome hearing your thoughts on these matters -- if there's enough 
interest, perhaps we could talk on the phone some day.

By the way, I'd like to congratulate you on your ACM Outstanding 
Contribution Award -- you have definitely earned it!


Paul McJones
paul@mcjones.org

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