I just skimmed this and I never worked in FEM but this really brought me back. I had the pleasure of meeting several of the people in the article (Hughes, Oden, Babuska, Demkowicz) and couldn’t help feeling some nostalgia as well.
I never had the pleasure of taking classes from Juan Carlos Simo, but he was known to have outstanding classes. His was a very brilliant light & life cut too short by cancer at the young age of 42.
[1]. DLEARN is a linear static and dynamic finite element code written in Fortran. https://github.com/fit087/fem_hughes