I have the pleasure of thanking ACM for granting permission to post the full texts of five ACM-copyrighted articles to the FORTRAN/FORTRAN II web site at the Computer History Museum. Here they are; for those already in the ACM Digital Library, we also link to the canonical ACM version via its DOI (Digital Object Identifier):
- John W. Backus. The IBM 701 Speedcoding System. Journal of the ACM, Volume 1, Number 1, January 1954, pages 4-6. PDF ACM Digital Library
- J.W. Backus, R.J. Beeber, S. Best, R. Goldberg, L.M. Haibt, H.L. Herrick, R.A. Nelson, D. Sayre, P.B. Sheridan, H.J. Stern, I. Ziller, R.A. Hughes, and R. Nutt, The FORTRAN automatic coding systemProceedings Western Joint Computer Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 1957, pages 188-198. PDF
- P.B. Sheridan. The arithmetic translator-compiler of the IBM FORTRAN automatic coding system. Comm. ACM, Volume 2, Number 2, February 1959, pages 9-21. PDF ACM Digital Library
- J. W. Backus, The history of FORTRAN I, II and III. Proceedings First ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages, Los Angeles, 1978, pages 165-180. PDF ACM Digital Library
- F.E. Allen. A Technological Review of the FORTRAN I Compiler. Proceedings National Computer Conference, 1982, AFIPS Press, pages 805-809. PDF
This is just one example of collaboration between ACM and the Computer History Museum; stay tuned for more. (Another example: ACM owns the copyright to the AFIPS Conference proceedings; expect them to show up in ACM’s Digital Library at some point.) I’d like to extend a personal thanks to Mark Mandelbaum, who is the Director of ACM’s Office of Publications, and to Rick Snodgrass, who co-chairs ACM’s History Committee, among many other activities. I first became acquainted with Rick when I lent a hand to the ACM SIGMOD Silver Anthology. Rick’s contributions to ACM’s Digital Library led to his receiving an ACM Outstanding Contributions award this year.