Communications of The ACM - Influential Articles

Influential Articles

Many of the great debates and results in computing history have been published in the pages of CACM. Examples include:

  • The issue of what to call the then-fledgling field of computer science was raised by the editors of DATA-LINK in a letter to the editor of CACM, appearing in 1958, the first year of CACM. They called for giving the field a name "which is brief, definite, distinctive". The call was echoed by a wide range of suggestions, including comptology (Quentin Correll), hypology (P.A. Zaphyr), and datalogy (Peter Naur).
  • C. A. R. Hoare's Quicksort.
  • Martin Davis, George Logemann and Donald Loveland described in 1962 the DPLL algorithm, containing the essential algorithm on which most modern SAT solvers are based.
  • The "Revised report on the algorithm language ALGOL 60": A landmark paper in programming language design describing the result of the international ALGOL committee.
  • The issue of changing ACM's name, since the "machinery" in question is no longer the size of a house and is now measured in micrometres.
  • Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl's original paper on Simula-67.
  • Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous letter inveighing against the use of GOTO. The letter was reprinted in Jan 2008 in the 60th anniversary edition of CACM.
  • Dijkstra's original paper on the THE operating system. This paper's appendix, arguably even more influential than its main body, introduced semaphore-based synchronization.
  • Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman's first public-key cryptosystem (RSA).

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