Failed Societies of Computing: Committee Z and the Professionalization of Programming

Neither the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) nor the Computer Society of the IEEE can properly claim to be the first professional organization devoted to digital computing. That distinction is better placed with Committee Z, which was a small subcommittee of the American National Research Council. As a professional organization, Committee Z had only a brief moment of glory in the fall of 1945 and vanished shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, as a pioneering computer society, it identified a fundamental division the early computer workers. That division separated hardware designers from programmers, engineers from users. Both groups wanted to direct the new field but in the early years, the engineers held the stronger position.