To be clear about the "(2014)", although Knuth gave this talk in 2014, this transcript of the talk is from the upcoming (February 2021) issue of Communications

To be clear about the "(2014)", although Knuth gave this talk in 2014, this transcript of the talk is from the upcoming (February 2021) issue of Communications of the ACM. The whole sequence of articles/talks is interesting: - (2007, Martin Campbell-Kelly), "The History of the History of Software" (DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.2007.4407444 ) — the trigger for what follows. - (2014, Donald Knuth): "Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science". Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAXdDEQveKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAXdDEQveKw Transcript: this submission (As mentioned, there was also a 2009 talk at Greenwich of which I can only find a 6-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKUg0V7pt8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKUg0V7pt8o) - (2014, Martin Campbell-Kelly): "Knuth and the Spectrum of History": https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6880249 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6880249 (click on PDF) - (2015, Thomas Haigh): "The Tears of Donald Knuth": https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-do... The short version is that over the years, in all "history of X" fields other than history of mathematics, the proportion of papers with technical content—exactly what ideas did people come up with, and how, etc—has decreased, while historians have taken a turn towards broader social commentary. In this talk, Knuth explains why he finds this unfortunate and what value practitioners can get from history. (He also ends with examples of this kind of history waiting to be written.) In his reply, Haigh points out that if computer scientists want such history they'll have to write and fund such writing; historians as a field won't do it. (Someone in the YouTube comments points out that military history is like this: there exist military historians writing technical history about things like the "terrain, weapon systems, tactics, strategy, etc", funded by the military, because members of the profession do care about this. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be much the case in computer science.) BTW, here are a couple of papers that Knuth wrote himself, which I would guess is the kind of historical writing he'd like to read (rich in technical detail): - Von Neumann's First Computer Program (1970): https://fermatslibrary.com/s/von-neumanns-first-computer-program https://fermatslibrary.com/s/von-neumanns-first-computer-pro... - Ancient Babylonian algorithms (1972): http://www.realtechsupport.org/UB/NP/Numeracy_BabylonianAlgorithms_1977.pdf http://www.realtechsupport.org/UB/NP/Numeracy_BabylonianAlgo... - The Early Development of Programming Languages (1976): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717306