Coming before the establishment of professional journals, societies, or regular meetings in computer science, the proceedings of the symposium offer the best picture of computing technology in the early years that we have available.
In January 1947, the Navy Department Bureau of Ordnance and Harvard University jointly sponsored a symposium at the Harvard Computation Laboratory on large-scale digital calculating machinery. It provided one of the first and most important early forums for discussion of the problems and approaches in the design, construction, operation, and application of computers. Coming before the establishment of professional journals, societies, or regular meetings in computer science, the proceedings of the symposium offer the best picture of computing technology in the early years that we have available. Included are papers by Howard Aiken, Samuel Caldwell, Jay Forrester, Herman Goldstine, John Mauchly, George Stibitz, and over twenty others. Proceedings of a Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery was published in 1948 by Harvard University Press. It is Volume VIII in the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series.
