The Tears of Donald Knuth

Mostly related to #2, that's what most annoyed me about school-taught history. Sure, the Japanese, just for the hell of it, spend a bunch of money sending planes to Hawaii and that's how poor ol' innocent United States ended up in WWII. C'mon, why did the Japanese do it? It wasn't until years later that I learned anything about a blockade in the Pacific. I mean I can understand a little "America: fuck yeah!" attitude, but no one thought to mention that little tidbit?

The entire planet gets into a war in the early 1900s because some two-bit archduke of something-or-other got shot? WTF? Woah, back up there, Teach; you've got some explaining to do. (And when I read the explanation years later, I still go "WTF?")

Point is, if the cliche is correct then we're doomed to repeat history again and again because there seems to be little effort to explain why things happened. What the hell was the U. S. doing in some dot on the map in Southeast Asia in the 60s? Domino theory? C'mon, I doubt anyone believed that even at the time if a ten-year old version of myself is saying, "how dumb do you think I am?"

But, as you mention, it would seem that there's little enough time to teach the timeline, let alone explain the treaty situation of early 1900s Europe such that WWI makes sense.

The original article also calls out such praises in the paragraph starting with "The truth is that regrettably little history of computer science, whether dumb or deep, has been written by trained historians".

Let me reiterate one recommendation in particular, Mechanizing Proof, by Donald MacKenzie. This is a superb introduction to the technical subject of formal methods as well as a superb history! My only regret is that it was published in 2001 and a lot happened in the last decade.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mechanizing-proof

"Ignition" by Clark is another exceptional exception.

Also http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/...

The science was so good that I got a bad grade on my History class paper, because I focused too much on the science and not so much on the "storytelling" of history. Which apparently puts me in good company slongside Knuth :-)

Another reason may be that humans are in the end social animals...

Exactly. To me that section was a total demonstration of narrow minded personal opinion.

What I've seen is that history is saved, and even accessible, but mythology is often stronger than history. Here on HN I've seen people say that Apple was the origin of the garage startup, when that goes back to at least HP, or the Apple was the inventor of profit sharing, when that was a Valley practice predating even Intel. Elsewhere I see people say that PARC invented the mouse, when that came out of SRI, or that Xerox flubbed on the laser printer, when laser xerography was making them over a billion dollars a year in the late 1980s. I see people sell Agile using waterfall as the strawman opponent, as if those were the only two possibilities. (See http://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-on for one commentary.)

I personally think there's a rebranding of Linked Data as a way to rescue the real-world failures of the Semantic Web dream by saying that all interlinked databases are part of Linked Data and ergo the Semantic Web, and my limited research of the historical record backs that up.

But this knowledge doesn't really affect how most people do business now. (Though we end up with highly paid consultants who peddle a false mythos rather than paying historians for the real information.) It's mostly relevant for those points that Knuth enumerated, which are superb humanistic goals that few beyond the academically secure or retired can afford to advance.

While much can be saved, many things are only in people's heads, or in their personal effects. Doing that history now, rather than waiting, means that more of those can be recorded for the future.

And found the leisure time, materials and learned the skills required required to do some fingerpainting on the side (assuming the subject of the painting did not have practical or religious purposes).

Certainly true, in fact it's kind of my point. Take a look at the "key sentence" from Harold Perkins' review of From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog:

"The computer and its software nervous system brought a revolution in human development as significant as the steam engine, the automobile or the aeroplane, and even more effective in shrinking the planet"

What would you get from a history of recent revolutions in human development from someone who doesn't know why steam-powered airplanes never really caught on? It doesn't matter what kind of geo-political story they can put together; the idea just doesn't work.

A Margaret Gowing told C-K about his history of EDSAC, "What you have written is clearly very good. I know practically nothing about computers, but I can tell that what you have written is good history, so far as it goes. However, let me urge you to look beyond programming technology to consider the kinds of people who were using computers and the problems that they were solving." Which is excellent advice, certainly, but part of what he comes up with years later, in his embarrassment over not following the advice the first time, is, "Jim Wilkinson investigated errors and stability in digital numerical methods and developed advanced matrix programs. These were to prove vital in understanding and preventing “flutter” for the British aircraft industry, which was still reeling from the de Havilland Comet air disaster of 1954," which makes me suspect he knows about as much about numerical methods as I do.

I use Firefox with Noscript. To see the desktop version I had to 'temporarily allow all this page' in the Noscript options.

Lack of margin actually helps readability on older mobile devices. Not sure why they'd go with those colors, though.