Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science

Followed Donald Knuth for years, read much of his writing, always an inciteful commenter on the details of computer science.  Reading this now.

Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science   By Donald E. Knuth, Len Shustek

Communications of the ACM, February 2021, Vol. 64 No. 2, Pages 33-35

10.1145/3442377

Editor's note: On May 7, 2014, Don Knuth delivered that year's Kailath Lecturea at Stanford University to a packed auditorium. In it he decried the absence of technical content from the histories of computer science being written, and he made an impassioned plea for historians of computer science to get back on track, as the historians of mathematics have always been.

Both the video and, now, the verbatim transcriptc of that talk are online. In the January 2015 issue of Communications,d historian Thomas Haigh analyzed and responded to the talk, concluding that "work of the particular kind preferred by Knuth will flourish only if his colleagues in computer science are willing to produce, reward, or commission it."

This Viewpoint, which we thank Communications Senior Editor Moshe Vardi for suggesting, is a condensed and highly edited transcript of the original talk that has provoked so much discussion. .. "