At the recent ACM 70 Conference, Bob Hitchcock chaired the SIGDA meeting. There were four of us in attendance: Bob (IBM), John Hanne (Texas Instruments), Murray Freeman (Philco), and myself (IBM). Later we caught a passer-by, Bob Brover (UCLA student). Although Bob was not acquainted with SIGDA or its purposes, at our insistence he did come up with a definition of Design Automation (DA). His on-the-spot definition was: DESIGN -- An iterative, decision-making process that seeks to optimize the value of society's resources. AUTOMATION -- Selecting of procedures for doing work with less effort.
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