Spelunking CACM, vol. 7 (1964): blind programmers and animations on microfilm

1964 brought us a language for compilers, and a paper on a graph isomorphism program that acknowledges that "no efficient algorithm is known", even as computational complexity theory was just starting to get off the ground as a field. That GI paper is especially interesting as a historical read because of the highly qualitative, primordial language about how hard problems are; the famous Hartmanis-Stearns paper is still a year in the future. Perhaps the most lasting impact, or at least the biggest problem that is still open, was addressed in the October issue, which has several papers on patents and copyright on both materials such as books and on software.

There is also an issue (April) with a lot of papers on education, and one on technology to help blind persons become computer programmers. A lot of the language in that wouldn't fly today, but what struck me was that, as far as I can tell, they didn't actually involve blind people in the work, either in early development stages or even in a direct usability experiment. Intriguing suggestion that blind people carry around more information in their head that sighted people, and therefore would be better at carrying around software designs in their heads.

I'm particularly intrigued by a paper describing a system for creating short black and white computer graphics animations on microfilm. I don't know much about I/O systems of the early 1960s, but I would have thought that some sort of oscilloscope or CRT-based visualization would have been in use by then. They include a nice summary of the film they created:

The text mentions that the Earth is actually shaded in the film, I suppose this simpler version is due to limitations of CACM's publishing. There is a footnote saying a 16mm film is available for loan from Bell Labs. I hope that's still archived somewhere!

I've been impressed so far with how forward-looking some of the earliest CACM papers have been, but I'd say in 1964 the breadth and potential of computing started to really blossom.