BLACK TIE(d)

ACM is a wonderful professional society, even if it is a little snobbish about who all can join its ranks. I joined once, when I migrated from EE hardware design to CS software design (only to discover that "purists" {e.g. ACM'ers} only count 'real' software, not microcode or machine code)

So, I un-joined, and something like eighteen years later, Gwen Bell saw me on a cross-country airplane ride and persuaded me to run for President of ACM, to which I didn't even belong. I rejoined, and won somehow. At my first SIG meeting, though, the irascible chair of SIGADA bellowed out "what qualifies you to be President of ACM?" One minute into a perfunctory opening speech, this outburst brought me up short. And directly, I had an out-of-body experience, one of those things where you kinda look down and see your lips moving, but you have no idea what they're about to say...

I heard the following utterance: "you, sir, have the wrong question. The question is, 'why didn't you have anyone qualified out of sixty-two thousand members?'" Hal Hart, the impertinent questioner, didn't ask any further. When I finally figured out that he too worked in industry, for TRW instead of "my HP" (our best customer in fact for years), and he too lacked a PhD, and he was consigned to work on ADA by his company's military mission, I actually felt sorry for him.

That kind of arrogance seems inbred to some of these groups. Eric Sumner, long-time Bell Labs guru, had a similarly smug salutation when I joined the IEEE Executive Committee. No question that Sumner was talented, even brilliant, at what he was good at, but civility and manners were missing in his curriculum. Sort of like Barney Oliver at HP. One wonders how much more they might have accomplished if they had been able to tolerate help, never mind encourage it.

So, on this night in June 2009, I'd been invited to a soiree, to receive acknowledgment as an ACM Fellow. Jenny came, as did two daughters -- Liesl and Cindy. I stood beside Alan Kay, in a cohort that included Pat Hanrahan (Pixar and Stanford), and Bill Buxton (Alias Research, GUIs) so it wasn't exactly like I was the last one admitted. It was satisfying, and much appreciated!

Odd, though, I'd have thought that somewhere along the way, maybe in the past thirty-six years, that ACM might, just might, have come to appreciate that Logic Analyzers and Microprocessor Development Systems are the reason that 99% of computing systems today are not mainframes or mini's, but are instead micro-based such as PCs or even micro-controller based such as the automata that open our doors, calculate our fluctuating gas prices on the pump and control our traffic signals. Never mind the micro's that run our cellphones, PDAs and iPODs

No... the award wasn't for any of that, nor for the Moon Monitor. It was "for service to ACM" by which they meant "served as ACM President without sullying the office" and helped later (sort of ) with the mnority report on job migration (how should I have known that the purpose of the report was to endorse outsourcing and offshoring?).

It didn't mention the ACM Digital Library or Project Argus for ACM itself, the first widespread semi-integrated Computer-Conferencing / Video Conferencing / Data Conferencing system deployed at HP, the code coverage work that helped secure Honeywell's processes from 'boomettes' (think of Union Carbide and the Bhopal, India disaster), done at Veritas, or the secure fail-safe kernel OS that was the underpinning for Los Alamos and the "traveling defillibrators", plus of course the original Palm Pilot. Each of these was useful, meaningful, unique software. But no, I didn't write the code. So, what's to honor?

Nonetheless, the award felt good. I was not as chary as Groucho Marx, and his famous remark that he wouldn't accept an award from any group dumb enough to give him one. It felt actually just great.