Hello Everyone, I thought you might be interested in my latest "Historical Reflections" column in Communications of the ACM, titled "The Tears of Donald Knuth: Has the History of Computing Taken a Tragic Turn?" (I thought about calling it "Flow My Tears, The Computer Scientist Said," in honor of a 1970s Philip K. Dick novel). http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fullte xt The piece builds on SIGCIS list discussion from last summer, when the video of Knuth's talk, "Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science" was posted online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAXdDEQveKw). Knuth's talk was, in turn, centered on his distress at reading Martin Campbell-Kelly's paper "The History of the History of Software," which he saw as celebrating a regrettable shift away from technical history of computing. Campbell-Kelly recently published his own response to Knuth in IEEE Annals: http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2014/03/man2014030096.pdf. As a Ph.D. historian my natural sympathies are with the turn towards broader historical approaches praised by Campbell-Kelly, but I have also come to appreciate the value and rigor of more technical kinds of history (including early programming tools and techniques by both Knuth and Campbell-Kelly). So I attempted to be fair to both perspectives, while stressing that the history of computer science accounts for a quite small proportion of the work now being done on the history of computing. I also argue the realities of academic society mean that the kinds of history favored by Knuth will only flourish if computer scientists themselves make a significant investment in historical work. Finally I took the opportunity to cite some outstanding work on the history of computer science from the past two decades and to publicize some current initiatives and new scholars in the area. Such is the allure of Knuth's name that the column was seized on by tech aggregation sites such as Slashdot, Hacker News, and Reddit when it first appeared online over the Christmas break. It's also been tweeted and blogged, and currently has about 75,000 downloads - more than the all the other articles in the January CACM combined. I can't say that the online discussions were uniformly well informed, although they do include some thoughtful comments along with sentiments such as "Gawd academia disgusts me. These "historians" would be more useful to society if they dug cans and bottles out of the trash." Anything that makes more people think about the history of computing and its purpose is a good thing for the field. I'd like to thank those who commented on drafts of the column, including Len Shustek, Dave Walden, David Hemmendinger, Bill Aspray, Chuck House, and Paul Fishwick. Not all of them agreed with all of my points, but I did find their input very useful in sharpening the argument and presenting my thoughts in a way less likely to unnecessarily offend computer scientists. Best wishes for the New Year, Tom