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Communications of the ACM

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ACM President's Letter: Scientific freedom and human rights of computer scientists


Performance statistics of a time sharing network at a small university

The purpose of the study was to characterize the input traffic on the interactive terminal facility (ITF) at Jackson State University by mathematical distributions. Five traffic measures were extracted from a week's job accounting …

Identifying potential to acquire programming skill

Over several years, a large number of students took the same introductory programming course. The students were drawn from all academic disciplines and academic experience levels. Low correlations were found between success in …

Minimal perfect hash functions made simple

A method is presented for computing machine independent, minimal perfect hash functions of the form: hash value ← key length + the associated value of the key's first character + the associated value of the key's last character …

Information transfer and area-time tradeoffs for VLSI multiplication

The need to transfer information between processing elements can be a major factor in determining the performance of a VLSI circuit. We show that communication considerations alone dictate that any VLSI design for computing the …

Scan line methods for displaying parametrically defined surfaces

This paper presents three scan line methods for drawing pictures of parametrically defined surfaces. A scan line algorithm is characterized by the order in which it generates the picture elements of the image. These are generated …

Technical correspondence: on secure personal computing


Technical correspondence: on secure personal computing. author's response


ACM forum


Computer chess at ACM 79: the tournament and the man vs. man and machine match