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 o

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 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.