he first conference arranged by the ASC was held at the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, MD. (Von Foerster, et al., 1968)
LATE 1960S
Social movements in the United States - against the Viet Nam war and for civil rights, women's rights, and environmental protection - Produced a time of student activism on campuses. In terms of research it was a productive period for the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois.
EARLY 1970S
At a meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in 1974 in Philadelphia, Heinz von Foerster introduced the term "second order cybernetics. "(Von Foerster, 1979) The Mansfield Amendment, which was an attempt to reduce campus unrest caused by the Viet Nam War, cut off government funds for research that was not related to a military mission, including research at BCL. (Umpleby, 2003b) The Biological Computer laboratory closed, and Heinz von Foerster retired and moved to California.
There was an argument between the officers of ASC and the publisher of the Journal of Cybernetics. The dispute was submitted to arbitration and the publisher won. Thereafter the journal continued to be published, but without ASC involvement. The journal published articles primarily in engineering. However, the field of cybernetics was increasingly emphasizing biology and the social sciences.
LATE 1970-S
In the late 1970s no meetings of the American Society for Cybernetics were held. The people connected with BCL attended meetings of the Society for General Systems Research, which a few years later changed its name to the International Society for the Systems Sciences.
Stuart Umpleby, who graduated in 1975 and moved from the University of Illinois to The George Washington University in Washington, DC, received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for an Electronic Information Exchange for Small Research Communities (EIES). The BCL group moved into cyberspace. (Umpleby, 1979; Umpleby and Thomas, 1983) This group, discussing General Systems Theory, was one of nine academic groups using EIES, supported by NSF. For three years in the late 1970s cyberneticians and systems scientists across the United States and a few in Europe communicated with each other using email and computer conferencing via dumb terminals and, initially, 300 baud modems. The long distance telephone charges were paid by Umpleby's EIES grant. When the grant ran out, there was disappointment that universities would not pay the communications charges. Indeed, it took almost fifteen years before costs declined sufficiently to permit regular email communication among academics.
For a few years, due to a conflict with the ASC officers in Washington, DC, there was a rival organization, the American Cybernetics Association (ACA), in Phil...
