> Purely from principles, one might consider it important to credit people for the ideas that they contributed.
That makes good sense.
> From a practical sense, it gives readers a way to find it for themselves -- contact the author that cited it.
Right, but in the case of a paper this old the author is most likely dead or extremely hard to reach. Maybe a standard part of any paper citing other papers should be a reference to an archived copy of the papers cited?
From a practical sense, it gives readers a way to find it for themselves -- contact the author that cited it.