About Banks

Banks of the Boneyard — “Banks” for short — is the student-run publication of the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It collects updates and expositions on the events and ideas explored across ACM, its SIGs, and its committees.

Banks traces its history to the very beginning of the ACM chapter, with records going back to 1984. Its publication schedule has generally spotty, and printing ceased entirely in 2009. In 2017, There was a brief revival in the form of a Medium page, but that also died out. In 2025, an initiative began to revive the publication.

Why bring it back?

Banks was one of the only places to get a centralized view of what was happening within ACM — a single feed of updates from the organization, its SIGs, and its committees, and a great way for newcomers to get up to speed. After publication died out, that information scattered across disjoint Discord servers and outdated websites.

It also serves as a snapshot of ACM at any given moment. Read back through old issues and you can piece together the chapter’s history and evolution. As one of the oldest technical organizations on a campus deeply intertwined with the founding of computing as a profession, that record is worth keeping for future generations.

The site

The current issue is published here as articles. The archive preserves every back issue we have going back to 1984.

Acknowledgements

The archival of past banks issues can be wholely attributed to Minh Duong (BS FA '24, MCS FA '25), who spent many hours sorting old prints from filing cabinets formerly housed in the ACM back room and now located in the ACM middle room. We greatly appreciate his dedication.