JACM's 50th anniversary
Joseph Yehuda Halpern · Journal of the ACM · 2003
This is Volume 50 of JACM; it marks JACM's 50th year of operation.JACM was the first journal devoted to computer science, started when it was not clear to many that there was even a distinct field of computer science.Fifty years later, both the journal and the field continue to thrive.This 50th anniversary issue is meant to be a celebration of both the accomplishments of the past and the potential for the future.Most of the issue deals with the future: I asked winners of the Turing Award and the Nevanlinna Prize to discuss up to three problems that they thought would be major problems for computer science in the next 50 years.(Jim Gray's Turing Award address was actually about twelve of what he thought were the most significant problems in computer science.Rather than asking him to pick three of them, he discusses all twelve in his article.)Their articles cover a wide range of topics.Although the articles were written independently, there is very little overlap between them.They address a wide range of problems, all fascinating.I hope that these articles will serve as a distributed version of Hilbert's Problems for our field.Unlike most of Hilbert's problems, most of these problems are relatively fuzzy.It's not always clear what counts as an answer.It will be interesting to see what the status of these problems will be 50 years from now, and how many will be viewed as "solved" (and how many others will turn out to be perhaps not such significant problems after all, in light of new developments).To give a sense of the past, the issue also includes reminiscences of many of the former editors-in-chief of JACM.We are particularly fortunate that among those who were able to write are the first two editors-in-chief: Franz Alt (the founding editor) and Mario Juncosa.Their articles give a real perspective on what things were like at the beginning of JACM.The article by Mark Mandelbaum, who has been involved with the journal for 25 years, first as Managing Editor and now as ACM Director of Publications, gives a sense of things from ACM's point of view; it also includes some fascinating statistics.Reading these articles inspired me to go the library and leaf through past volumes of JACM myself. 1 Volume 1, Issue 1 includes an article by John Backus on "The IBM 701 Speedcoding System."This system was a precursor to the system that included FORTRAN, and is clearly in the purview of what we view as computer science today.The issue also includes descriptions of application programs, such as an article entitled "Life Insurance Premium Billing and Combined Operations by Electronic Equipment."By 1959, it is clear that the preponderance of articles in the journal are in numerical analysis, certainly the most mathematical aspect of computer science at the