Banks of the Boneyard Rises from the Dead!

After a long hiatus, Banks of the Boneyard is back and better than ever! We’re excited to finally bring back our beloved student-run publication.

For those unfamiliar, Banks of the Boneyard (or just Banks for short) is a historically student-run publication managed by the ACM @ UIUC student organization. Its history can be traced back to the very inception of the ACM chapter itself, providing updates and expositions on the events and topics explored within the organization since 1984. Although Banks’ publication schedule has always been about as predictable as the Urbana weather, records indicate that publication ceased completely in 2009. A brief revival attempt was made in 2017 in the form of a Medium page, but that effort quickly fizzled out as well.

So why care? Why are we spending our precious time reviving what was already a shaky tradition in a medium long past its expiration date? Surely, there are better uses of our time. Well, there are a handful of reasons we felt that the revival of Banks was justified.

Firstly, Banks was one of the only places to get a centralized view of what was happening within ACM. Past issues served as a conglomeration of updates from the overarching ACM organization, its SIGs, and its committees. For newcomers to ACM, it was a great way to get up to speed with the latest happenings. After the publication died out, this kind of information became progressively harder to find. Nowadays, past events only exist as notifications scattered across disjoint Discord servers and outdated websites. By bringing back Banks, we hope to make information about all the cool things our SIGs and committees are doing more accessible to all students.

Secondly, in keeping with the idea that Banks was a centralized place for updates, it also serves as a snapshot of what ACM was doing at any given time. By looking at older Banks articles, we can piece together ACM’s history and evolution—from its humble beginnings as a small group of computing nerds seeking a community to tinker with, to the behemoth it is today: a very large group of computing nerds seeking a community to tinker with (but now with Google and LLMs). Being one of the oldest surviving technical organizations on campus, and being associated with an institution as deeply intertwined with the very founding of computing as a profession as Illinois, we ought to have a proper record of how students have engaged with the field. Unfortunately, as publication of Banks ceased in 2009, we have a knowledge gap in ACM history from 2009 to 2020. We hope that by bringing back Banks, we can maintain a written record of ACM’s shenanigans for future generations to look back upon.