
Oral History of Donald Knuth (2007) [video] - tosh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp7GAKLSGnI
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nsajko
Here is the transcript, for those who do not feel like viewing a three hour
video ;)

[https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10265805...](https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658053)

An excerpt:

Feigenbaum: One of the things worth observing -- it’s off the track but as
long as we’re talking about history -- is that our current generation, and
generations of students, don’t even know the history of their own field.
They’re constantly reinventing things, or thoughtlessly disregarding things.
We’re not just talking about history going back in time hundreds of years.
We’re talking about history going back a dozen years, or two-dozen years.

Knuth: Yeah, I know. It’s such a common failing. I would say that’s my major
disappointment with my teaching career. I was not able to get this across to
any of my students this love for that kind of scholarship, reading source
material. I was a complete failure at passing this on to the people that I
worked with the most closely. I don’t know what I should’ve done. When I came
to Stanford from Caltech, I had been researching Pascal. I couldn’t find much
about Pascal’s work in the Caltech library. At Stanford, I found two shelves
devoted to it. I was really impressed by that. Then I came to the Stanford
engineering library, and everything was in storage if it was more than five
years old. It was a basket case at that time, in the 60’s.

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acqq
And my favorite story about him:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567)

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brudgers
Another video interview with Knuth,
[https://www.webofstories.com/story/search?q=knuth](https://www.webofstories.com/story/search?q=knuth)

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jacquesm
The man likes his hardware:

[https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html](https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html)

