Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science and the ideas that have not yet come to fruition despite being extremely old

> Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives

Most of this kind of content comes off as relevant/topical but mindless entertainment. This is not a "deep dive" of anything that I could practically apply in my daily work. It feels good to think this content might add value and then to subsequently consume it, but it's effectively junk food.

I used to spend a lot of time watching crap like lex and primagen before it became obvious that these kinds of information channels are not meaningfully enriching despite sounding like they should be to a casual observer.

Pretty much any book or long paper that decides to take a historical turn is going to be at least as good if not better than these talks. There are a lot of historical resources out there that go into different parts of "computing history" more generally. I don't know what would meet your criteria for computer science or software engineering more narrowly. To me they are all very interconnected. I couldn't say whether it'd be more important to have a nice presentation that includes Babbage and his machines vs. a neat presentation that covers Codd's work going directly into Chamberlin and Boyce's work on System R. A historical presentation has to decide what it includes and excludes. In recent times I've enjoyed Fabien Sanglard and his work on the histories of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, the hardware environments behind them (development and deployment), and the CP-System. Lots of "lost" technical knowledge in them. Of course the earlier and higher level Masters of Doom book contains a lot of neat history as well, though less technical. The HOPL (History of Programming Language) papers are always insightful and contain a lot more "plain" computer science, though of course with a focus on programming language things. Richard Gabriel could write a lot more of history than he already has; here's one of his papers that (among other things) details a history of mixins in object oriented languages, and how they were "rediscovered" poorly in a way that obscured their actual historical nature, demonstrating an idea of incommensurability. https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf

I should also add that even interviews are valuable. Coders at Work is fantastic at that and drawing out technical opinions and reasoning; notably the subjects interviewed don't all agree and have sometimes drastically different work styles and preferences. (And also adding from another comment, Turing Award Lectures are great history, and Uncle Bob even has a history book out now on influential programmers.)

Who is also a working engineer (and programmer of the highest caliber) who is in touch with the zeitgeist of engineering.

Even without knowing your specific criteria, #2 on your list must be Alan Kay.

But I'm curious who you think #3 is.

>Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science

I skimmed through the video because I don't have two hours but there's no lost knowledge in it, he's going over well known papers from Dijkstra, Hoare or Knuth. The paper he bases most of the talk around Knuth's Structured Programming with go to Statements is his most often cited work, there's a very high chance you'll encounter that early in any undergrad course. So the answer to your question is, pretty much at any local uni with a CS course.

Knuth could do them, in theory. The guy was literally there when stuff was happening.

Kevlin Henney

Me, I do them.