They do exist, but I do wish for more. We’re only a couple of decades away from software construction being a hundred years old (and a few from software _engineering_ being a century old) and I think it’d be wonderful to have some encyclopaedia-like resource that says “here’s everything we tried for the first hundred years, and why we do things this way at the end of it”.

For my part, I try to contextualise the way I/my peers work now with the other things we tried over my career, and maybe the decade or two before that which contextualised _my_ junior experience. For example, I run a monthly magazine with a colleague, and in our devops issue we discuss how ideas in DevOps come from manufacturing, from Rapid Application Development, and other inspiration (https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/play-it-again-sam/). I just recorded a podcast episode where I look at _what_ documentation was considered “comprehensive” at the time of the agile manifesto, and what docs are still useful despite the industry-wide tendency to eschew all prose (https://www.sicpers.info/podcast/episode-47-comprehensive-do...).