This was the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM. The theme was "Halfway thru the First 100 Years of ACM in Los Angeles", A Collage of Memories by Five who Lived Them. The meeting was held at the Four Points Sheraton in Culver City because the Ramada Hotel was unavailable because of a power outage.

Myron Pullen introduced Lee Schmidt. Lee announced that Ed Manderfield had a stroke in April and died on Tuesday, June 1, 2004 at 6:25 A.M. Lee provided information on the time and location of the funeral. Ed was born in 1921 in Michigan and started SIGPLANs wherever he went. Ed was known for leaving messages longer than your answering machine would take and then calling back to complete his message. Lee asked that people who have stories about Ed Manderfield to send them to him by email so he can put them together into a small book. He will be a hard man to replace.

Myron called on Paul Willis and John Bagwell. Paul presented the outstanding member awards to Mike Walsh and Steve Rowell. Steve Rowell was unable to attend the meeting. John gave Paul Willis an award for his service as Chapter Chair.

Myron introduced the panel of speakers to provide notable events and special memories of different eras. The speakers were Chris Shaw, Roger Mills, Marsha Hopwood, Linda Howard and John Halbur.

Mike Walsh mentioned some of the past Chairs who had replied, but could not make the meeting. They included Dave Oppenheim, Mike Ikezawa and Paul Cooley and we were glad to hear from them.

Cheri Kaylor announced the XML PDS that will be held this fall. There is an ad in the June DATA-LINK and information will be posted on the LA Chapter Website. (Note: Since the June meeting the date of the XML PDS has been delayed and it will be rescheduled).

Roger Mills covered the 1954-1964 early years. In 1954 Ben Handy and Sybil Rock decided that we should have a Chapter out here. The first meeting of the group was in January of 1954 and 15 people attended. The first formal meeting of the Chapter was held on April 28, 1954. The Chair was Sybil Rock. Then the Chairs had two-year terms. Sybil Rock had to leave in the middle of her term because of a job change. Roger talked about DCA (Digital Computer Association). Roger said the first time he went to an LA ACM meeting in 1955. He met hardware types and people wouldn’t talk to him so he went back to DCA even though he was a non-drinker and the DCA was sometimes called the "Drunken Computer Association". DCA and LA ACM got together and combined the sociability of DCA and the intellectual capability of ACM. In 1960 the chapter reached 1047 members. Roger said that during his first term as Chair the chapter went from 1000 members to fewer than 500. The LA Chapter started SIGs and he mentioned SIGPLAN (Programming Languages), SIGBDP (Business Data Processing) and SIGOPT (Programmer Training).

The LA Chapter had a row with ACM President Jean Sammett. (Note: Elizabeth Manderfield said that either more information should be given or perhaps this comment should be left out. As I remember, there was more than one row with Jean Sammett, usually about something the LA Chapter had done without appropriate consultation and/or approval from Headquarters ACM in her opinion. She really cared about what we did.)

There was an ACM conference in Los Angeles in 1961; the first time that computer hardware was shown instead of books and that it was held off a university campus. There were tutorials on COBOL and ALGOL. Roger said that during the 54-64 era computers were very big at the start but got reduced to the size of a room. (Roger reviewed this write-up and replied: "I may have said it but what should have been said was that the computers started out filling a room and in 64 the computer had become much smaller, but with all of the tape units, printers, etc., they still took up whole room.")

Chris Shaw covered 1964-1974 but claimed that his memory of that decade was pretty fuzzy. Lots of things were going on then; it was a very eventful decade. Civil Rights Act, Vietnam War, and many other things. 1969 – First Arpanet node was installed at UCLA. There was a SEX operating system. Robert Noyce invented the microprocessor. The IBM 360 computer was developed. Codd came out with the relational data model. Structured Programming rose its ugly or lovely head. In 1969 Woodstock and the Lunar Landing happened. Multics was developed at MIT. CAI - Computer Assisted Instruction - had its beginnings. PL1 and Jovial were in that time frame. UNIX and the C language had their beginnings. The NATO conference on software engineering was held. Typical computers-IBM 7094, 360, 2390, RCA Spectre 70, CDC 3200,3600, 3800 SDS Sigma 7, Sigma 9, CDC 6500-6600, GE 645, NCR 500, Century 200, Burroughs B6500, Univac 1108, Honeywell H200 and H400, DEC PDP series. The Simula language was developed. The TCP protocol was developed. LA high school students crashed an Arpanet host so they were early hackers. In the entertainment world, Flip Wilson – Geraldine – What you see is what you get (relevant to word processing). Time sharing systems. 1964 Bob Dillon in entertainment. Distributed Communications-Packet Switching, Rand Report. LA SIGPLAN had working groups on Decision Tables. Late 1960’s – GRLS – Forerunner of DB2. 1969 – Power typing and stand alone word processors.

Marcia Hopwood covered what she could remember of 1974-1984. She was a Chapter Chair during that era. Chris Shaw helped get Marcia involved in ACM when she wandered into a SIGPLAN meeting. She migrated back to Southern California and was involved with people who were pioneers or people who knew pioneers. One of the important people was Dick Hamming. There was discussion about whether the purpose of computing is or is not insight. People just charged in and did things without thinking about failure. There was a sense of commitment to giving something back to an industry that had done well for us; we got paid for having fun. Later things changed to a point where there seemed not to be enough money to keep us doing this. Computers went from room size to desktop. Ed Manderfield seemed to predate telephones because he didn't seem to need one. On one occasion Ed was upset about minutes and was yelling about it. Marcia hung up on him because he continued to yell. Ed called up Dave Oppenheim who called up Marcia to pass on Ed’s complaint. Toni Shetler was a key person on ACM-81 that was a successful conference held at the Bonaventure hotel. SIGSOFT was started by Marcia, Toni, and Joanne Lockett. Ed Manderfield referred to them as the "Rand Mafia". Marcia was Regional Rep and on the ACM Publications Board. Edith Myers and Barbara McNurlin were DATA-LINK editors during that era.

Linda Howard covered 1984-1994. She couldn't remember her term either. She mentioned a list of different SIG groups that started and ended during the era. In other 1980 events Peter Coffee started giving talks. The LA Chapter moved to Travelodge, Viscount, and the LA AirForce Base, and finally the Chapter moved to the Ramada in 1987. Interesting topics were broad band and local networking. In May 1985 we had a talk on peripherals and letter quality printers. We had talks on computer crime, Ada, Robotics, Expert Systems, microcomputers in large organizations, Small Talk, Objective C, Ada, CASE tools and Risk Assessment. There was a talk on Software Engineers being the last to apply automation. GroupWare was a topic. Some of the talks gave us insight on the future and others were on things we never hear about anymore.

John Halbur covered 1994 to date and he hoped he would be able to remember it. Fortunately Bob Mercer had the DATA-LINK file. During the period there was the emergence of the Internet and Y2K. The LA Chapter got 3 excellence awards from the ACM. The LA Chapter is the oldest surviving chapter (last one remaining). Following John, Deborah Moorhead became the Chair but moved before the end of her term and Stephanie August took over. John said he was able to serve as Past Chair for two years in a row. SIGs broke off from the Chapter. Peter Coffee reported COMDEX had 2500 exhibitors but it has gone down some since then. The Chapter slashed dinner prices to try to bring out more people. Linux PDS workshops were held in 1999. In 1999-2000 Bill Cook was the Chair and that year the Chapter gave Dave Oppenheim his lifetime achievement award. Lee Schmidt and Paul Schmidt provided humorous notes from the Chair and reports on COMDEX over the years as well as passing out T-shirts. The website was created by Dave Oppenheim and expanded by the Schmidt's. Last year's Chair was John Bagwell and the current Chair is Paul Willis. We had reports on Y2K and the run up to that event. Peter Coffee warned about electric power problems. Ed Manderfield organized a "Repent-Y2K Survival Party" in January 2000. Larry Lessing talked about Internet Architecture and Public Policy.

Myron Pullen recognized Bob Mercer for his efforts on maintaining the history of the LA Chapter.

Bob Berman – said he got a lot personally out of LA ACM and in the early days Rand was a special place. In early days LA ACM got 200 people at meetings. We had an affiliation with the LA Urban League to train programmers and Roger Mills ran free programming classes.

After the notable events and special memories, Myron Pullen asked for some predictions about the future.

Linda Howard predicted in 10 years everything would be done in India. In 15 years it will all be back because of identity theft. Gloria Silvern said schools don’t have enough computers in class. It was predicted that your watch will be your PC. Marsha Hopwood said that things are getting more and more specialized. There was a discussion about whether or not printed publications would disappear and it sounded as if most people thought probably not. The problem of changing data formats continues to make paper viable. The problem of computers causing reduction of personal interaction was mentioned.

As the last part of formal meeting John Bagwell presented special awards to all of the speakers and there was a plaque "in tribute" to the LA Chapter on the occasion of our 50th anniversary from ACM, signed by the ACM president.

Lee Schmidt presented "Compusauras Awards" that were anything but serious. Lee wore a Compusauras award that was a crazy hat. He passed out print hammer actuators and offered a print drum to anyone who wanted it. Compusauras Qualifications were mentioned and most of the group met at least one.

A picture was taken of all of the past Chapter Chairs who were present.

This was the tenth and last meeting of the LA Chapter year and was attended by about 35 persons.
Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary