We've been preparing a proposed Virtual HALL of FAME for the ACM Council (you all know ACM, right? The Association for Computing Machinery, not the Academy for Country Music). In particular, ACM awards 20+ major awards every year, plus a slug of newly elected ACM Fellows. Prize money is now appraoching $2M per year, with some fantastic support by companies such as Google, Microsoft, Infosys, IBM, and Two Sigma.
And the ACM History Committee has been embarked now for nine years on 'capturing' more about the winners, especially the Turing Award winners. I've personally done something like 165 video interviews in this connection.
BUT, those interviews, like thousands at the Computer History Museum, the Babbage Institute, the Silicon Valley archive at Stanford, the Bancroft at Berkeley, the MIT Museum, the Dupont Museum (the Hagley), and other such places, are usually relegated to a dry transcript and on occasion a posted un-indexed video, that you have to KNOW that it exists for a specific person to find it, and your patience gets tested pretty hard to read and/or view and enjoy it.
The proposed Virtual HALL of FAME would illuminate these heroes, make their lives more accessible, and their importance more prominent--for students, teachers, professionals, and yes, even historians. We'll show a 'walk-thru' and summarize a couple of key elements in the next post.
And when all is said and done, it is fascinating to me that most of these thousands of interviews focus on WHAT they did, and HOW they did it. Naturally, you say! That's why they're being interviewed--they did something that has been deemed important for their university, their company, their discipline, or even society at large. And that is truly important, no question about it.
But the meta-message for me, taking in 'the set' of them, is WHO were these people, and WHY did they do what they did? That is the story for the next generation. "We" are enthused by the specifics of what they did and how they did it, because "we" were sort of in the trenches with them, and we can therefore appreciate what they accomplished. But the next generation takes all of this for granted--they don't know a world before iPhones and ubiquitous Internet, and soon they'll not know a world pre-AI driven. A story about how the iPhone keys got realized isn't too pertinent. So, what's the 'constant' here?
I submit that the constant is "Where does the inspiration come from to do work of this caliber?" And stories of "Who these people were, the difficulties they faced, and how they surmounted them" are more important to serve as motivation for a youngster (or even a middle-aged erstwhile practitioner) than the details of their achievement.
For example, what Steve Jobs did on returning to Apple, and re-invigorating it with the iPod, the iMac, and the iPhone are wonderful stories, and Walt Isaacson does a great job telling them (via Jobs' own recounting), but somehow the fact that it took Jobs seven years to get Apple back to sales and profitability as it was when he re-arrived is omitted from the story. If he hadn't 'owned the Board' he'd have long since been evicted a second time. WHY was he able to persevere in such straits? Did he have personal doubts? Was the company morale affected? Leadership in those circumstances had to be dramatically important, in ways not even hinted at in the best-selling biography.
Stories about how the mostly unsung heroes who did the public domain human genome project both persevered and succeeded against the organized 'for profit' teams--the latter headed by 'the big names' that have been extolled--are mostly absent, but think where the world would be if that vital technology were 'controlled' for private gain. How do we even find out such stories if we focus on WHAT and HOW the genome works, and fail to include the WHO and WHY of the 'unsung folk'.
So our thinking is that a HALL of FAME should include 'the whole story' -- not just WHAT and HOW, but WHO and WHY. And, not incidentally, this has to cover more, MUCH MORE, than the "big names" that make the journalism headlines. So we propose to cover ALL of the honorees of ACM, which is about 1,500 Fellows and nearly 1,200 Awardees, selected by peer groups over 50+ years in 20 categories of computing, Not just the 'big names' although of course some are here, such as Vint Cerf and Steve Wozniak. And a lot of 'big names' for Wall Street are not here, including Steve Jobs. In fact, CACM, ACM's premier magazine, bemoaned Jobs' negative computer science research impact https://cacm.acm.org/news/136161-what-did-steve-jobs-do-for-computer-science/fulltext?mobile=false. Some consider this chary; others are quick to note that ACM acknowledges technical success vs. business $$. And certainly, Jobs has gotten considerable acknowledgement, but our point here is that there are LOTS of other key contributors in our field--computer science is both broad, and a team game.
Our proposal has many hurdles to surmount to make it a reality, but in the scheme of things, we remain confident that illuminating WHO and WHY for many of these innovators will be valuable for students, teachers, professionals, and yes, even historians who seek to understand even years hence how this discipline changed the world forever, and WHO and WHY they did it.
Actually, think about it--the whole world needs to and may well want to know about this--lay people, citizens at large, homemakers, grandparents all may savor more stories to appreciate these incredible innovators and their creations.
