The first HICSS conference took place in 1968 at the University of Hawaii, with the goal to promote collaborative research on computer science, information technology, and telecommunications.
Notably, the first six annual meetings focused primarily on various scientific issue related to the design, development, use and implementation of the ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet.
Norman Abramson and Franklin Kuo, co-founders of HICSS, used HICSS platform to launch the ALOHAnet, that was subsequently employed in the Ethernet cable based network in the 1970s, and following regulatory developments in the early 1980s it became possible to use the ALOHA random-access techniques in both Wi-Fi and in mobile telephone networks.
As the conference grew as took focus more on the development, design, implementation, use and evaluation of information technologies in a wide spectrum of applications, in particular in business, HICSS worked with the IEEE Computer Society for its proceedings under the leadership of Ralph Sprague Jr. and Tung Bui, conference co-chairs.
Researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle helped create a visualization of HICSS scientific influence over time.