Computers and Thought
The field's first anthology gathered Turing's paper, Samuel's checkers, GPS, SAINT and pattern recognition work under one cover.
Why it matters
Scattered results were presented as one discipline with a canon, and the next generation learned the field from this book.
Feigenbaum and Feldman split the material between simulation of cognition and artificial intelligence as engineering. The book was reprinted many times and served as a textbook for decades; it also fixed one set of papers as required reading and left the rest at the margins. In an oral history of 2007 Edward Feigenbaum recalls that he and Julian Feldman collected the papers into the book, published in 1963; that Herbert Simon, then business-publications editor at Prentice-Hall, advised the publisher against it because it would not sell; that it sold many copies; and that the editors gave its royalties to found the Computers and Thought Award for young researchers.