I suppose this makes a good point for me to jump in with my 20 milli-dollarsworth.  To establish context, I'm in the middle to upper part of the age rangeat 62.  My first contact with a computer was my cousin's Altair around '76or '77.  The first exposure to information about computing were a PDP-8manual and a FORTRAN manual centered on the 1620 in the attic growingup. I'm not sure where it came from, but even as early as my freshman year ofcollege, I had some interest in the history of the field.  Several of us misseda few days of class to attend NCC '81 in Chicago.  That year they werecelebrating the 35th anniversary of the UNIVAC I.  One of the days wasdesignated "founders' day" and they had a session where several earlypioneers spoke.  My memory is a little foggy, but I'm pretty sure the listincluded Hopper, Backus, Eckert, Kay Mauchly (John had already passed),and I think maybe even Zuse.  To this day, I've never been able to finda definitive list of who was there, much less a recording or transcript ofwhat they said.  But it definitely made an impression on me.  That eventwas also coupled with an accidental brush with history during my undergraddays.  One day I was wandering through the stacks at the library when abook caught my eye.  The spine simply had the title "Manual of Operation."Of course, I had to take the volume down and see what it was the manualof operation for.  It was an original copy of the manual for the Harvard Mark I!Needless to say, I checked it out. On Sunday, May 19, 2024 at 05:00:04 PM UTC, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: That brings us to the present where I'm also on the faculty of a universityand am doing but a tiny amount to try to keep the history alive.  On Tueday,I'll be doing what I've come to call my CS professor endurance test wherefor six lectures in a row, I'll be presenting what has become a traditionallecture for our freshmen.  In it, I trace a line of influence from the Whirlwind,through the LINC, to a PDP-8/M that I demonstrate for the class, to the8-bit computers that I grew up with.  I've generally heard good thingsabout the experience, so there are at least some who are getting somevery brief exposure. The other comment I'll make has to do with the natural evolution ofthe hobby/study of history.  The older things get, the more studyingthem becomes something specialized.  The number of people whoare enthusiasts of the '70s and '80s 8-bit micros here is certainly verystrong, and quite a number of us are also into minis from the likes ofDEC, DG, and HP.  But the interest in the vacuum tube machines ismuch more specialized.  It's natural to gravitate to what was availableand aspirational when we were first exposed to computing, but therewill always be some of us who go deep into older stuff.  I, myself, amseveral years down the rabbit hole of the ENIAC, the most recent bitbeing a direct demonstration of its Turing completeness: http://cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/eniac/turing/ So I feel confident that the interest will always be there, but it will alwaysbe confined to a relatively small subset of those in the field.  As much asI think we'd all argue that it's important for anyone to know about the historyof their field, it's not likely to become pervasive unless the big-name employerssitting on advisory boards for CS departments start saying "you really needto have a required computer history class."  When every CS major hasthe experience of writing some PDP-8 assembly code and toggling itin on a front panel, when they all have the experience of realizing a differentialequation on an analog computer, when they have all written a simulatorfor an old machine, then I'll be able to die happy.  At this rate, I'll live forever. BLS