For 1962, I considered choices such as an early Knuth paper, on tricks for making evaluation of polynomials more efficient, an early (but not the first) paper on theorem proving machines, a description of an event for high schoolers that points out that there were already 8,000 computers and 30,000 professionals in the country (sadly, the article has no demographic info on attendees), and especially an early paper on multiprogramming from NASA (what's not to love about a paper that says, "Some educationally valuable mistakes were made"? It's instructive that it refers to "the interrupt feature", indicating its newness, but the modern term "interrupt service routine" was already in use.). In the end I settled on a notice about ACM's policy toward standardization. CACM already had a section on "Standards", edited by S. Gorn, but this notice is otherwise unsigned.
Early, the paper makes three binary divisions: users v. "professional computer people", industrial v. theoretical (interestingly, not academic), and hardware v. software. This divides those with an interest into eight categories.
It points out the risks of too-early standardization. As a vendor, if you tie yourself to a standard too early, an innovative competitor can introduce something new, and your hands are tied.
I found this table intriguing. Likely you're vaguely aware of some of these organizations, but you may not realize how early and dynamic they were. Keep in mind that this is a mere 17 years after the end of World War II, and yet Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Japan, who collectively suffered some of the worst devastation, are represented. (Russia, China, Poland and Belgium are listed, too, but don't seem to have entries, so I'm baffled as to why they are included.) (In the most breathtaking post-WWII recovery, just two years later Tokyo would host the Olympics and the first shinkansen line would open.)
It's also interesting that the table focuses on language; today, the UN's list of official languages notwithstanding, almost all international standardization work takes place in English, with a vestige still of French. I admit to being lucky to have been born in an English-speaking family at a time when it is the de facto language of science, technology and international commerce. Not so long ago, the choices would have been French (esp. for diplomacy) and German (science and technology).
Quoting from the paper:
The policy of ACM toward standardization is therefore the following:
1. It is extremely conservative as far as the development and promulgation of standards is concerned.
2. It is resistant toward precipitate standardization, specially in any area in which not enough is known to make such standardization theoretically sensible or stable.
3. It tends to be neutral in those areas where standardization is a matter of arbitrary selection, in spite of its recognition of the usefulness of such selection. That part of its membership which is vitally interested in such arbitrary selection is already represented in the industrial side of the activity.
On the positive side, the society is vitally interested in maintaining wide open channels of communications.
4. Thus it takes a positive interest in the stabilization of terminology, whether by reporting common usage or by declaring preferred usage (the normative function).
5. It is interested in the development of appropriate fundamental concepts, the establishment of the relationships among them, and in the quick dissemination of such developments.
6. Finally, it is interested in the development of standard methods of specification of processors, whether they be computers, programs or systems, of languages for such processors and of translation processors for such languages. Included in the methods of specification are methods of documentation for each type of audience or interest in the computer area.
Overall, the policy expresses some interest in standardization of systems, esp. programming languages, it seems, but little else. Almost sixty years later, we can see that indeed ACM, despite its importance in the computing ecosystem, has largely remained aloof from the issues of standardization, leaving that to ANSI, IEEE, FIPS, ISO, IETF, NBS/NIST et al.
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