Small computers in a large world

Three years ago, 877 of us gathered in Philadelphia at the first Joint Computer Conference, a meeting organized by a committee representing three professional societies which were then, as now, active in the design and application of electronic computing devices. These are, of course, the AIEE, the Institute of Radio Engineers, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The theme of that first conference was a review of the state of the art up to that time. In the following two Decembers, in New York, N.Y., and in Washington, D.C., attention was directed first toward the problem of input-output and then toward the problem of reliability. Meanwhile, Western Joint Computer Conferences were held in Los Angeles, Calif., in February of 1953 and 1954, with a third scheduled for the first 3 days of March 1955 at the Hotel Statler in Los Angeles, Calif.