If you ever need to read something in one of Knuth's books, that's useful history for you. I know because I was looking how to efficiently generate power sets

If you ever need to read something in one of Knuth's books, that's useful history for you. I know because I was looking how to efficiently generate power sets and eventually the only good answer was in TAoCP!!! So the answer is: history, the kind of history full of technical details that Knuth argues for, is extremely useful for our profession. It is the empty, pop history, made without algorithm descriptions and full of only anecdotes what you are thinking about? Knuth argues against that!