In 1947, a notice was sent to various people:[3][4] On January 10, 1947, at the Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery at the Harvard computation Laboratory, Professor Samuel H. Caldwell of Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke of the need for an association of those interested in computing machinery, and of the need for communication between them.

The committee (except for Curtiss) had gained experience with computers during World War II: Berkeley, Campbell, and Goheen helped build Harvard Mark I under Howard H. Aiken, Mauchly and Sharpless were involved in building ENIAC, Tompkins had used "the secret Navy code-breaking machines", and Taylor had worked on Bush's Differential analyzers.

[8] ACM is organized into over 180 local professional chapters[9] and 38 Special Interest Groups (SIGs),[10] through which it conducts most of its activities.

[11][12] Many of the SIGs, such as SIGGRAPH, SIGDA, SIGPLAN, SIGCSE and SIGCOMM, sponsor regular conferences, which have become famous as the dominant venue for presenting innovations in certain fields.

[13] ACM also sponsors other computer science related events such as the worldwide ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), and has sponsored some other events such as the chess match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue computer.

ACM has made almost all of its publications available to paid subscribers online at its Digital Library and also has a Guide to Computing Literature.

In 1997, ACM Press published Wizards and Their Wonders: Portraits in Computing (ISBN 0897919602), written by Christopher Morgan, with new photographs by Louis Fabian Bachrach.

[19] The ACM Digital Library contains a comprehensive archive starting in the 1950s of the organization's journals, magazines, newsletters and conference proceedings.

There is an extensive underlying bibliographic database containing key works of all genres from all major publishers of computing literature.

[citation needed] ACM adopted a hybrid Open Access (OA) publishing model in 2013.

[23] Authors may post documents on their own websites and in their institutional repositories with a link back to the ACM Digital Library's permanently maintained Version of Record.

All metadata in the Digital Library is open to the world, including abstracts, linked references and citing works, citation and usage statistics, as well as all functionality and services.

In addition, starting on April 7, 2022, ACM made its publications from 1951 to 2000 open access through the Digital Library in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the organization's founding.

The ACM presents or co–presents a number of awards for outstanding technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer science and information technology.

The ACM-W gives an annual Athena Lecturer Award to honor outstanding women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.

The IEEE focuses more on hardware and standardization issues than theoretical computer science, but there is considerable overlap with ACM's agenda.

[65] ACM has also jointly sponsored on events with other professional organizations like the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

[66] In December 2019, the ACM co-signed a letter with over one hundred other publishers to President Donald Trump saying that an open access mandate would increase costs to taxpayers or researchers and hurt intellectual property.

This was in response to rumors that he was considering issuing an executive order that would require federally funded research be made freely available online immediately after being published.