 to them. I'm sure they'll help you. I'd like to introduce this morning's keynote speaker. Dr. Janet Tolland comes to us from the School of Information Management in the University of Victoria, Wellington. Her research topics include sustainable information systems and the history of computing. Can you please join me in welcoming Janet Tolland to the stage? Thank you very much for inviting me to PICON. I'm very pleased to be here. And what I want to talk to you about today is history of computing, my topic, so I'm just getting back to my slides actually, which are down here somewhere. Yeah, so computing is quite a young profession. It's been around for about 60 years, but it does have some history. And one of the things that I was particularly interested in looking at is those early people, the first people who worked in computing, the pioneers. There were very intelligent people, very committed, and they gave a lot of time to computing. But computing really came about at a very interesting time. It was the 1960s and the 1970s. There were very turbulent times politically, especially in the USA. There were things going on like the Vietnam War and civil rights, the hippie movement that people had very strong feelings about. And that kind of hit the computing profession right at the beginning. And those first pioneers were very much thinking about, well, this is my working life and this is my personal life. All this stuff is going on around me in society and what am I going to do about it? Do I bring the political events of the day and let that come into my work, or do I keep my sort of technical work very separate from my political beliefs? And people had very different views. And that's what I want to talk to you about today. So it was relevant at that time, but also I think it's relevant to us today to think about some of those things. All right, the issues that we face are different today, but some of them I think have some resonance. So what I'm going to talk to you about today is really four main characters who are very instrumental in the setting up of computing's largest professional association, which is association of computing machinery. So one of them was ACM's founder, Edmund Berkeley, who was its secretary for many years, and a man who had a very strong social conscience. Another person was Daniel McCracken, who was also very active in the ACM, and he too was the founder of computers against anti-ballistic missiles. So he was very much against the use of computers in military applications. On the other side, if you like, the people who thought that the professional work and political work could be kept separate were Gene Sammett, the first female president of the ACM, a very strong lady, and also Peter Denning, who was also an ACM president. So I want to talk about their views and how this all played out within the organization and the discussions they had with each other. So three of the topics I'm going to look at is what they thought about the Vietnam War, what they thought about the equal rights of women, and also a big issue at the time was Soviet computer scientists who were being discriminated against in their own country. And I also want to look at one of the special interest groups that came out of the ACM, which was a special interest group for computers and society, and what kind of stand they took. So why look at Association of Computing Machinery? Well, it's the largest association, if you like, that there's also IEEE and others. It's got 100,000 members. At the time I'm looking at 60s and 70s, mainly it was active in the USA, but today it's gone global. Half of the members are outside the USA. It's got this huge resource of information about computing, the ACM Digital Library. If computing has a Nobel Prize, it's the Turing Award that's issued by ACM every year. It publishes a useful magazine, KACM, that you can go to find out what's happening. It's got 37 special interest groups and there's 170 annual conferences. So it's a huge organization. Now, you might be questioning at this point, I'm talking about computing as a profession. Now, a lot of people would say, well, it's not a profession. It's like just a loose grouping of different people who've got different interests and so on. It's not really seen in this way, but the reason I'm talking about is profession is that those people who started the ACM, which is the people we're going to be looking at, really did want computing to be seen as a profession. It was a new technical thing. They realized it was something very exciting and they thought, well, we want to form this association because we do want to have a voice within society as a group of technical experts. We want to be seen as the people to go to. So they saw themselves, if you like, as a founder of a profession. So I'm going along with that. So here we see a picture of Gene Samet, who I already mentioned was the first female ACM president. Obviously, she's dressed in the fashions of the day, but she's giving a statement which is just kind of sums up what this talk is about. So on the one side, there's people within ACM who say what we're about is science and educating society about science and also technical matters. And then at the other end, there's people who say, well, it's our moral duty as computer scientists to understand these things to comment on the social issues of the day. And this was what played out for them. So I was fortunate enough to carry out this research last year when I got some research and study leave for my university. And I'd just like to put in a little plug for Charles Babbage Institute, which is a big archive for the history of computing located in Minneapolis in the University of Minnesota. And I didn't know anything about Minneapolis before I went there, but it's a really lovely city. And if you get the chance, I urge you to go there. So basically, you've got the Mississippi River runs through the middle of the university campus. And by the side of the river, there's built a huge cavern in the ground. And in this cavern, the university and the city of Minneapolis just store hundreds and hundreds of archives. And those archives are in boxes. And you can get those boxes kind of brought up to the Charles Babbage Institute. It's in a library that sits on top of that big hole in the ground. You can get those boxes brought up and look through them. And it's actually looking through them, I have to admit, is pretty boring. Like what a lot of research, a lot of it is tedious. But you've got to go through that tedious stuff to find out the interesting stuff. And if you're lucky enough, as you ride the Mississippi, you might see a few bald eagles flying around as well. But obviously, some of the early stuff is in paper form, but a lot of stuff is online. So if you go to this URL, you can find amazing resources. I've got oral histories with all sorts of people from the history of computing, the fully transcribed, you can go and look at them. A lot of the archives and materials are online. So if you are interested in history of computing, it's a great place to go and have a look. So how did Association of Computing Machinery start? Well, it started as Eastern Association of Computing Machinery with a meeting of 57 people who met in September 1947. Now, even at that time, there was a few people who thought, oh, we've got enough societies already, because obviously something like the IEEE had already got a sort of section for computing. And John von Neumann in particular was saying, oh, for heaven's sake, not another association, not another set of meetings to attend. But he actually was roped in and did give a few talks for SEM. So 57 people turned that inaugural meeting and therein was to advance the science and development of new machinery for computing, reasoning, another hundred. And they very quickly grew. They dropped the Eastern and they became SEM and they proved very popular because people wanted to meet and discuss what they were doing. So the person who was most responsible for that first meeting, who set it up and got everybody going, was Edmund Berkeley. And he was the secretary of SEM for many of those early years. And he was actually the first person to write a popular book on computing, which he called Giant Brains and Machines that Think. So you'll notice the computer is actually plugged into the person's brain there. So that was one of the things that he was most popular for. He was really keen to get the idea of competing out to the general public because he believed that computing is really logical. And if people learn that logical reasoning, and they apply it to other areas of their life, then the world will become a better place. So that was his view, not shared by everybody. So how did he start off? He was a brilliant mathematician. He sort of went to school early, went to university early and finished, and then ended up working as an insurance actuary, which he hated. He found it really, really boring. But through that work, he did get involved in a little bit of computing. And then when the Second World War happened, he was called up, but he worked as a naval reserve in the Harvard Computation Library, where he worked alongside Howard Akin and Grace Hopper, one of the most famous female programmers. After that experience, he was lucky enough actually to get a small inheritance, which meant he didn't have to do his boring job as an insurance actuary anymore, and he could do what he actually wanted. So what he wanted to do was to write books like Giant Brands and Machines That Thinks. And he also, if you like, developed the first home computers. So he worked on these kits where you could build your own computers, and he sold them to people. So he had one called Simon, and he had one called Brainiac. And this was back to his idea of getting the general public to understand computers to be hobbyists. He had, he published a magazine or a journal that he edited called Computers and Automation, and also he was very socially active. And particularly from 1958 onwards, he was active in the anti-nuclear movement. And he was a particular organisation he joined was a committee called SAIN. So I mentioned he'd spent time at the Harvard Computational Lab. Now here you see some of the people who work there. Basically, during the Second World War, it was a great time to be a computer scientist, if you wanted to get lots of money because the American government generally realised that computers had a big role to play in winning the war, and they were prepared to put a lot of money on it, a lot of money into it. So one of the people who, the man who ran the Harvard Computing Lab, is stood there at the top of the counter, a character called Howard Akin. And what he had basically done is developed this Mark I computer. And what it did was very quickly do all these computational tables. So they were using that to work out things like the sort of magnetic resonance zone around ships, people at Los Alamos who were developing the nuclear bomb, were also looking at the work of that computer. Now by the time Edwin Berkeley joined them, they were actually working on the Mark II computer. And what that was trying to do was trying to calculate the sort of firing range of various missiles that you sent out. So Akin had been able to, if you like, put together a really crack team. So Grace Hopper down there was a member of his team. She was a lieutenant in the Navy. They also had civilians as well. So they worked very closely with IBM. So it was a joint mission, or at least for some of those times. So Akin and Berkeley joined that team. Now there was a bit of a personality clash because Howard Akin is renowned for being a very strong character. One historian described him as having a very imposing presence. He was well over six foot tall. He had piercing eyes and having beatling and satanic eyebrows. So eyebrows can be satanic. He's supposed to possess them. But the idea was he was a very strong character. It said that when he met somebody, he would look at them and just rate them on a scale of one to ten. And when he met Berkeley, he had him as a one. Grace Hopper, fortunately he did rate as a ten and he said, she's a good man. So she was alright. But even though Berkeley was a brilliant mathematician, he was a little bit obsessive. And this is one of the reasons Akin took against him. Berkeley would take notes at every meeting. He would record everything. He actually went around with the debt stamp. And as well as taking notes, he debt stamped his notes. He was one of the reasons that he was so clever is that he kept all these records. But this just didn't go well down well at the Harvard Computation Lab. And one day they did play a not very nice trick on him and that they stole his little debt stamp from him. And they went to the men's room and they got a toilet roll and they stamped every sheet on the toilet roll with his debt stamp. Something which he wasn't very pleased with. But he did have a good working relationship with Grace Hopper, even if he didn't with Howard Akin. Anyway, he had his time there and then he really went back to sort of civilian life. And when the war finished and he went back to civilian life, what came about was really that now he had this inheritance and he could do what he'd like. He could really indulge in one of his interests, which was social activism. He was chair of this same nuclear policy. So what the men think he was really concerned about was the use of computing technology in nuclear weapons, which he really felt was unsafe. He was also concerned about nuclear radiation in general and the effect that it was having on the environment. So there was a lot of things about, you know, in if you drink milk there might be nuclear radiation in it. He was concerned about environmental issues. So in that he was maybe a little bit ahead of his time. But he was also concerned about global issues and all sorts of things. So what he really wanted to do was he said it's the responsibility of computer people to apply the technical expertise to improving society rather than just war. He established a committee on the Social Committee of Computer Scientists and when you look at his records he was an obsessive record keeper and that's why it's so good to research him because everything's there. So if he picked up a pamphlet from an organisation say for racial equality he would file that pamphlet. There would be a date on it. If he gave them a five dollar donation he would record that. So you know all the societies that he was involved in and there was about 175. So it was things like business executive for Vietnam peace, racial equality, conscientious objectors, all sorts of movements around the world. But his main focus was on anti-nuclear. Now I mentioned they played a trick on him at the Harvard Computation Lab. Well he could also play a few tricks himself. So one of the things that he did when he didn't have quite enough articles for his journal Computers and Automation he would write an article as Neil McDonald. So nobody as who's his alter ego. So nobody knew for years and years that Edmund Berkeley and Neil McDonald were actually the same person but they were writing but he was he was a bit tricky because Neil McDonald would also write letters to the newspaper and to other journals stating the views and if anyone dared to spell Neil McDonald's name wrong if it was MC McDonald they would he would write quite angry letters to them and demand that they published a narrator. So he was having his little fun and games as well at the time of all this. I did find among all those records that there was a New Zealand link or write a little bit tenuous. So there was one thing there which is a press release from an organization called the Men of the Trees and that was from its founder the very grandly named Mr. Richard Saint Barbeca who was the actual man of the trees himself and what he was writing was a president, an appeal to the president of France to go for a dramatic tree planting program but the point in the New Zealand connection was at the time he was writing it was based in New Zealand where he did write this book which was about the threat of erosion and deforestation in New Zealand so New Zealand was kind of in there. Obviously being involved to in so many different groups did throw Berkeley under suspicion so in the late 50s it was the time of McCarthyism a lot of people were being investigated there was a lot of publicity about reds under the beds and people were being encouraged to speak out if they suspected anyone of being a communist so some person who's not identified went up at the private gathering of the Navy and said the Navy should clean its skirts of Berkeley who's a reserve he was still a reserve officer. Berkeley was very proud of the fact that he'd been a reserve officer in the Navy during the war and he definitely didn't want to give up that association but he was very surprised one day to Navy officers knocked on his door and handed him this huge writ with all these allegations that basically he'd been associating with communists that he was a communist in me carrying out all these activities. He very strongly defended himself in writing because what he really believed was yes I'm socially active yes I do talk about what I believe I believe in free speech but I'm definitely not a communist but though he defended himself strongly against these charges the Navy at the end of the day after considering decided no we do believe you've got these affiliations and either you resign from the Navy or we're going to discharge you so faced with that at the end of the day he did submit his resignation and received an honorable discharge but it did make him quite bitter about that and affected him for the rest of his life. So we've talked about Berkeley another character that we're going to look at is Daniel McCracken so a little bit later in 1965 he formed an organization called computer professionals against anti-ballistic missiles and their line was we're not against anti-ballistic missiles per se it's just that we don't believe the competing technology within it is really robust enough and trustworthy unlike Berkeley he had some income because he was publishing all these best selling competing textbooks sort of introduction to cobalt and something and they've done very well and he had a lot of royalties so he decided to take the royalties he made from those books form this organization and use the money to travel up and down the country really speaking it out against the use of computers and anti-ballistic missiles so that was something he was doing independently of ACM he was active in ACM and quite a bit later he became president but this was independent activity so it was it had about 500 members so it was quite a significant organization and in contrast to Berkeley who was obsessive McCracken was a very skilled politician so even people who didn't agree with him would sort of complement him up on his political skills he knew how to handle a peak of meeting whereas Berkeley was somebody who was so passionate about his political beliefs he didn't always it wasn't always the most diplomatic person about approaching people so we get to a point where within the association of computing machinery things were coming to a head so the late 60s in the USA were interesting times there was a lot going on people were really starting to speak out against the Vietnam War and feel that the US involvement in that had gone on long enough and there were people within ACM who said right it's time for our organization to make public stand and publicly stated against the Vietnam War and on the other side were people saying well really that's nothing to do with ACM you might be against it in your personal life but as as an organization that's about computers and technologies the Vietnam War is a bit outside what we think about the other event which made matters come to a head was the fact that ACM wanted to locate its national ACM conference in Chicago now what had happened in Chicago in about 1968 was there was a huge riot so about that time there'd been a lot going on in America Martin Luther King had been assassinated Robert Kennedy had been assassinated there were riots in about a hundred cities around the country and in Chicago what happened was a lot of people gathered together to have a demonstration against these things there was about 10,000 demonstrators and about they were met by 23,000 police and national guards and they kind of met right in front of what was the big Hilton Hotel in Chicago so it was very well publicized and a lot of people felt that the police had mishandled the situation with a lot of controversy about it and because of that quite a few ACM members said hey we don't want to have a conference in Chicago that there were quite a vocal voice so it really came to a head and the organization said we're going to decide this matter once and for all we're going to put this to the vote so also behind this idea of the vote was the tax status of the organization so by American standards ACM was a 501C organization so that meant that you were not allowed to lobby to influence legislation you're a scientific and education society with a concern for the public good so what was at stake really was that if ACM stood up and said we do want to lobby we are going to comment on politics that it would have financial implications because they would lose this tax status so the question they put to the vote is shall the Constitution be revised to comment on what they termed deeply political and social questions so the deeply political and social questions they were looking at was well should we comment on the Vietnam War and should we locate a conference in Chicago and what came back was resoundingly most members felt no we don't want to we want to stay as a technical society so it was about 8,000 to 2,000 for that and the president at the time Bernard Gala actually got a lot of letters from people who said why are we even having this vote it's inappropriate we're a technical organization these these social issues are outside of what we do and what he encouraged members to do said well if you're interested in politics be interested in politics be active through your church or through your local associations but don't bring it into ACM so in the same year other events were taking place so they decided to have a silver jubilee founders dinner and it'd been kind of forgotten at this time that Edmund Berkeley was one of the founders of the ACM but somebody remembered it and said look let's celebrate these founders at our dinner so the two founders they celebrated were Edmund Berkeley and Frank Alts would be honored as the founders and there were a few people who kind of said well Berkeley can be a little strong do we kind of trust it but it'll be alright so you can imagine the situation of a very formal dinner it was the ACM founders dinner it was all sort of black tie for the men and the women in evening dress and everybody sat there and there was a speech by Frank Alts who was talking on the theme of reflections and then a speech by Berkeley whose theme was horizons well very quickly into Berkeley's speech things started to go quite wrong he called foreigners formation of the Association of Prevention of Doomsday and he basically said that the use of computers in the use of the it more made him ashamed of belonging to the computer field but then he started to get quite specific he started to look around the room and actually point out the people who we all knew were working directly using computers for military technology and he was actually pointing and naming to people and particularly there was one computer company called honey computer manufacturer called Honeywell who were designing antipersonal and he named them specifically now at this point Grace Hopper who was a friend and colleague of Berkeley decided she'd had enough she was still involved in the Navy as the head of programming languages and she got up and walked out and she was followed mainly by the military folk that there so the thing was a disaster and the poor guy who was chairing it Eric Weiss was desperately trying to save the day and he proposed a toast to Berkeley so the few people who were left gave him a toast but he really if you like caused this controversy at this dinner so even though they had had this question of importance vote and the organization had resoundingly decided no we don't want to talk about social issues issues didn't go away so one of the things that popped up again was the equal rights amendment so the equal rights amendment was some legislation in America was basically going to give equal rights to women the same rights as men so it actually been around for a long time since 1923 and there's quite a bit of controversy about it because basically some people said yes it's a good thing but basically middle class women very much supported it they said yes women should have the same rights as men but there was some movement against it from working class women and that said it actually does give working class women some protection from sort of maybe more demanding physical tasks like heavy lifting anyway it was around and at this time it was before Congress and there was a strong strong pressure within people from ACM to say we don't care if this affects our tax status this is such a burning issue there's some women working in computing and we really want to make a stand and say we're in favor of it so another character we're looking at was another ACM president Peter Denning is very famous for his work on virtual memory and security and he was very strongly in the camp that ACM was what he called a Switzerland among professional societies that you might have your political views but when you come to work together in a technical way you leave your political views at the door and people of all colors and all political stripes can work together and he felt it was very very dangerous for a society that was still quite young at that time only 25 years old wasn't as established as the physicists or the chemists to actually be making these political stance he really felt strongly that people should keep their politics outside so he got a lot of flak from this he was called a male chauvinist pig as a lot of people were at the time even Jean Samet who was a very senior female figure within ACM though she personally supported the eco rights amendment felt it was very inappropriate for ACM to make a public comment on it so she came in for a lot of flak as well so in the end they did not make a statement on it and in fact the eco rights amendment has never been passed because an American law even if it's passed by Congress it has to go through or be passed by all 52 states and all 52 states have never actually passed it but I don't think that was particularly caused by the ACM not making a statement so I mentioned Jean Samet before and again she was the first female president of ACM she's very famous as a developer of a programming language called Formac and she's basically an expert on programming languages she is still with us and at the time she was seen as a very tough lady because basically when she did become president ACM was in a lot of financial difficulties but there were within ACM if you like pockets of money some of the special interest groups were very large had lots of money so she basically had to get ACM on its financial feet again and in doing that she did have to be quite tough and made quite a few enemies now one issue that came up under her watch when she was ACM president was what they call a church in issue so a lot of scientific and technical societies around America at that time were facing issues about Soviet scientists who were being persecuted at home and wanted to come to America but the Soviet government was not letting them come to America and Valentin Turchin was a Russian computer scientist and he'd been head of a lab for automated systems building now in Russia his lab had been closed down he'd been taken in for interrogation six times he was also a supporter of Amnesty International so basically he was under pressure and Columbia University in USA had offered him a post as a visiting scholar but the Soviet authorities were not giving him an exit visa to leave Russia so he couldn't work in Russia and he wasn't being allowed to leave so an American member of ACM paid for Turchin to his ACM membership and then brought it to the ACM Executive Council and said can we make a public statement in support of Turchin being allowed to be given an exit visa and send that to Leonid Brezhnev at the time now this caused a huge for all so it brought up the specter of hey we already had the vote on a question of importance we decided we wouldn't comment on social and political issues is he even a member of the ACM it's just because somebody's paid his membership so they basically had had this meeting and a lot of people were very angry in that it took up half the meeting time so this was an Executive Council meeting people like to travel across America you know stay in hotels take part in this meeting so it was a meeting when very important business took place but this issue took up two hours or half the meeting time there was 150 pages of paperwork involved so the main person who was in support of them making a statement on Turchin at the time was Daniel McCracken whereas the people who were against it were Jean Samet and Peter Denning who just felt it was inappropriate for them as an organization to take these stands and two of the representatives who were at the meeting one from the northeastern region and one from New York commented on these views and they really show the the kind of polar opposites so Jerry Sultan from the northeastern region was very much in favour of SCM not making any comment on this issue and he's saying well they're trying to say we're callous and reactionary we don't think it's appropriate whereas Thomas Dioria who was from New York had the opposite view he said yes definitely it's a moral duty to to make this statement we have an opportunity to help a fellow human being who's incidentally a computer professional we rose to that occasion so they did make a public statement in support of church and being given an exit visa but they didn't actually follow it up very strongly they sort of said right we've made this statement and Daniel McCracken was trying to get them to follow it up but they they sort of did it but not followed through however the issue did keep coming up and later in 1980 the SCM did establish a committee on scientific right freedom and human rights which was basically to help Soviet scientists and people from other eastern bloc and South American countries who were facing persecution at home and Anthony Ralston and another character called Jack Minka were instrumental in that so people kept pushing and they did have the committee and Valentin Valentin Turchin did eventually immigrate to the USA in 1977 where he took up a position at City University of New York so those were the three issues so one of the things that came out of it was SCM decided right we will set up a committee on computers and public policy a committee that's still very active today they're drafted in Daniel McCracken as inaugural chair and what the first thing he worked on was a list of issues concerning computers and public policy so despite the vote against talking on deeply political and social issues this was still a very well debated topic so when they had a panel on it at conference they got 150 people along to discuss it so there was a lot of interest so the kind of things people were concerned with was using computers in the home there was a lot of thinking that banking was beginning to be being computerized people were concerned about that computer literacy how to help people from maybe what you call more marginalised areas of society access to those computer skills and how that would help them have social power however what they decided was well if we are going to talk about these social and political issues they must have computer technologies at the centre of them if it's a proper PRCM to talk about them and it must be in a way that if you know about computers you can talk about something in a way that somebody who didn't know about computers couldn't so if you're talking about computer related privacy or something you've got some insight which gives you maybe the reason to talk out about it when somebody else couldn't another way that ACM was the formation of a special interest group SIGCAS which is special interest group for computers and society which started in 1969 and was particularly looking at ethics security and privacy so that was seen as the only group in ACM well by some people where you could actually say I'm not just about computers but I'm also interested in how that creates the rest of the world now at the beginning they did have some difficulties so when they first started up they were saying they're not enough interests we're going to be dissolved now this prompted a very strong statement from some New York based members now I'm not quite sure whether this statement was from the people who were forming SIGCAS a whole or just from this group in New York I suspect it's just from this group in New York because it was a very strong statement and it was actually published in a magazine called Interrupt which was published by a group called Computer Professionals for Peace and the co-chairman of that Edward Elkind was actually an active and openly declared communist so it's kind of coming out and then they were saying quite clearly we oppose the war in Vietnam the statement that ACM didn't make we oppose discrimination as practiced in the computer field so that was about equal opportunities if you like for everyone being employed not excluding people through tests and so on we oppose the establishment of mass data banks again that was a privacy issue people at the time are very concerned about that we oppose exploitation of the uninformed by unscrupulous computer schools so that was a big issue at the time somebody would just set up a computer school in a disadvantaged area take money or people say oh you finish this training you'll get a job and then at the end of the day they maybe knew how to punch in a bit of data but they didn't have a clue how to program and they supported programs called the constructive application of computers to solve society's problems so it was threatened with dissolution but after these statements the group did get together and form however because of those apprehensions that they would be taken over by what they termed these wild-eyed radicals the wider ACM group said hey we've got to put a few controls on this group because we don't know what is going we'll make sure that the management of that special interest group are appointed by ACM they've got an advisory panel of ACM and if a lot of non ACM members join that special interest group which are allowed to their votes can't count for more than half because what they were worried about maybe was people from computer professionals from peace would kind of join that special interest group and make a takeover however by 1975 that was all calmed down and the group were allowed to select its own officers because it actually actually never came about in fact though the group was quite radical in the things it published at the beginning there were articles about the use of computer technology in Vietnam they reported Berkeley's speech at the Silver Fubuli dinner after a short time they were actually being challenged by their own members to say actually you're not radical enough at that in that same dinner speech Berkeley had dismissed them as an example of tokenism they had a letter from in their journal from someone called Richard Sprague saying hey I joined this group expecting it to be radical and actually you're not very radical you should be looking at things like he particularly wanted them to look take computer evidence from John Kennedy's assassination and sort of reinvestigate that he was suggesting various topics when the president of CICAS went to talk out to a student chapter they said well you say all these things but what is the group actually doing and their response was well the management of this special interest group can't hope to talk for members unless we put everything to the vote we've got this newsletter it's a forum for discussion and they welcomed that forum discussion in fact what happened was that in fact the members of the group were a little bit passive so at the time it was quite cheap to join a special interest group and if you looked at the members of ACM a lot of them were in multiple special interest groups so there were CICGAS members but in fact they weren't probably very radically active most of them but the main issue that they were concerned about was privacy so on the one side there's that very radical letter that was published in the interrupt magazine on the other side when you looked at the evidence at the time there was a lot of concern about privacy issues there was setting up a national data bank people were very concerned that all the data about them would be brought together in one place and the implications that would have and their first chairman a character called Robert Bigelow was actually not a computer person such but an attorney who was interested in privacy issues so it seemed that actually the main driver for the formation that group was more about privacy than some of the more radical concerns like anti-Vietnam war and so on and if you looked in 1977 they did a survey of their research interests you can see that yes they are talking about the wider impact on society but they're also equally interested in privacy issues and in ethical issues if you look at what the conference panels there were sponsoring privacy was there as was things like education and computing so they did make strong contributions but their contributions tended to be in privacy as we already said and also very strongly in education they developed tertiary courses in computing computers in society so that anyone was doing a computer science degree they're also likely to do a module on computers in society so they were made aware of the where the issues they were particularly interested in developing computer training courses for what was termed at the time disadvantage group so black and Hispanic populations trying to get good computer training for them they looked at the use of computers to improve learning in schools and in universities and so on they were also interested in computer use in healthcare and in ethical issues and what about broader ACM well what came out at the end of the day was ACM did engage in political issues they did decide they had a contribution to make to public policy but only when there was a clear connection to computing when computing was at the core however though I might have been critical of ACM it's fair to say they were more prepared to consider a range of viewpoints than other professional societies like the chemists and the physicists maybe because there was such a new organization and some things that they were broad agreement they should look at were things like privacy they were very against the use of the U.S. Social Security number as a universal identifier because it could tie all the information about you together they have done a lot of work on improving education and the computing curricula and also in weeding out these poor quality training schools were offering fake training to people for a lot of money I've talked about ACM so what was happening outside of ACM well we know there was a society called computer professionals for peace and they're called Chairman Edward Elkin was a very committed character he was a strongly declared he was openly declared as a communist and he didn't care who knew it that was his beliefs and as a consequence of that he often didn't work he only was able to get work for short periods of time as a computer programmer and sometimes he didn't because people wouldn't have anything to do it a more well known organization that was started a bit later is computer professionals for social responsibility which was around from 1983 to 2013 and that was basically started up by two characters at Xerox Park Several Onstein and Laura Gold as a listserv and the listserv became very active and they began to meet face to face and they were thinking at the time because there was a lot of organizations like physicists for social responsibility and so on do we really need another organization and then they decided that computer people were seen as if you like technical experts as wizards so what they were against was strategic defense initiative or the Star Wars system put out by Reagan and they decided yes we do have contribution to make so they formed this society and it very quickly grew it had a global influence and there was an affiliated group that was active in Christchurch at the time I don't know much about them but as time went on they were not just looking at military use of computers they looked at more wider social applications at ICT for development and so on but it was interesting that even though they started out in 1983 which was later than the period I've been talking about at that time what they found was that the perception of computer people was that they had no social concerns there were technical wizards if you thought of a person who worked in computing you didn't think of somebody who was interested in politics and that was the perception of the broader public and that's the perception that they met so I'd just like to finish with a parable of the three bricklayers which was a favor of Edmund Berkeley so you probably heard this before you asked the bricklayers what they're doing and the first one says I'm laying bricks the second one says I'm building a straight wall and the third one says I'm building a cathedral so Doug Schiller who was one of the founder members of computer professionals for social responsibility applied this to a community networker so you ask three community networkers what they're doing the first one says I'm setting up a mail distribution list and some web pages the second one says I'm working with the social service agency to develop community projects and the third networker says I'm helping to build a new society so I have some references if you want to follow this up there's a very good book on Edmund Berkeley by Bernadette Longo another good one about physics and missile defense and some others coming out I'd just like to thank you for asking me to talk and thanks to Charles Babbage Institute for hosting me the ACM gave me a small award to do research and my university and I'd just like to leave you with this question in your mind where do you stand are you with people who think like Gene Samet and Peter Denning so all all the people I've talked about were very intelligent people are all very moral people they all gave a lot of their time to developing the computing profession but they had different beliefs so Gene Samet and Peter Denning just felt computer work and politics should be kept separate you could be political but don't bring it into your working life and then on the other hand you've got Daniel McCracken and Berkeley who saw it as a moral duty to influence society in their area of technical expertise so I'd just like to leave you with that question in your mind today and thank you very much for listening thank you time for a few questions raise your hand make me run Doctor Doctor did you find any evidence of government influence in keeping this organization the ACM separate from political concerns well I think the main influence was through that tax status which is used for a lot of organizations like that they give them this tax status they get tax breaks and that means that they can't lobby so there's always that threat that if you start to lobby you'll get your tax status taken away and and societies are very concerned about that so there's no direct examples of someone from the government going to to talk to them specifically but that that was the main way these things were controlled okay thank you very much