1983 marked the first quarter century of CACM itself. The outgoing Editor in Chief, Robert L. Ashenhurst, marked the occasion with a January special issue reprinting some twenty-one of the best articles from the archives. The paper copy of this issue must be a collector's item. Every article in that is worth reading, even today, and I'm pleased to see that my own spelunking found many but not all of those -- some fun things to go back and look at later!
In February, Peter Denning took over as EiC, and instituted many changes, including going to a full-color cover (hinted at on the January cover).
I didn't realize the Computer History Museum went back this far, but there is an article by Gordon Bell on a visit to a famous computer, organized by the museum (which he founded). "The Computer Museum's first considered priority is to save history, the second is to display it, and the third is to interpret its historic role," we are told. (Oh, wow, Bell was visionary enough to begin organizing the museum in 1968, and incorporated it in 1982! Thank you!)
Programming Pearls came in this year, under the stewardship of Jon Bentley. The first one, appropriately enough, is about one of the canonical CS problems -- sorting data stored on disk.
Doug Comer wrote a history of CSNET -- while the project was still ongoing! It mentions our Dave Farber, but only as a participant/performer.
Cook's Turing Lecture on computational complexity (a religious document, if ever there was one) led me to an article on Ultracomputers, a switched (indirect) multicomputer architecture that Schwartz claims scales to thousands of processors. Now that's vision! I like that Cook dedicated a section to space-time products. I'm curious what the modern thinking on this is.
But for me personally, given my own location and interests, the most eye-catching item this year was the special issue with several articles on Japan's Fifth Generation, the astoundingly ambitious, MITI-directed, top-down AI inference machine project. (This is the source of the image at the top -- is there no higher-resolution version available?) Articles included an introduction (Pamela McCorduck, who co-authored a book with Ed Feigenbaum on the topic), a somewhat separate article on Japan's software management processes (Paul S. Licker), a trip report (Ehud Y. Shapiro) on the Oct. 1981 conference sponsored by the government, and an interview on the US response (Rosalie Steier interviewing B. R. Inman). The trip report in particular is a gold mine of anecdotal history and contemporary views of the project, and features the memorable quote, "We may argue whether it is better to think and program in Lisp, or think and program in Prolog; but both are certainly superior to thinking in Lisp and programming in Prolog."
Today, the Fifth Generation is largely considered to be a failure as a project, but my opinion is much more nuanced, and at any rate it's complicated. That's all for another day.
