> I would love to see more CS history classes. It would be nice to see something like that. I'm not sure it will happen. Our human society in general - for so

> I would love to see more CS history classes. It would be nice to see something like that. I'm not sure it will happen. Our human society in general - for some reason - has deemed that the history of "computation" - or however you want to put it...isn't important. Think about how many automobile museums there are in the world - or google it, whatever. Both public and private. You probably have several where you live - especially if you live in the United States (less so in Europe, even less elsewhere). Or museums about aircraft and aerospace - another technology that has fundamentally changed human society. Then compare those to the number of "computer history" museums. Despite the known fact that the computer has fundamentally changed our society in ways that are still not completely clear, and ongoing - we have done so little to preserve that history. Software is a large part of that as well...we have systematically destroyed, or have left to "bitrot" because "proprietary software" in some back room (or worse, in an unknown location because a company went out of business, or was purchased and re-purchased, etc). For instance - there are several Cray supercomputers out there - in private ownership and in museums - but have you ever tried to find the OS software or documentation in order to actually make one run? I'm not going to say it's impossible to find, but I wouldn't call it easy, either (a great resource for info on these old machines and software is the bitsavers archive). We ignore this history at our peril; there are numerous cases on both the hardware and software side of things of "reinventing the wheel" because this history isn't widely known or understood. In some cases, it's not even avoidable because the information that would prevent it is either not easily or widely available - or is non-existant period! In other cases, it may be available, but it just isn't widely known about or taught. I don't see this changing any time soon, unfortunately...