I also agree with Knuth and for me it has been extremely valuable to know the history of various technologies, and especially knowing the reasons why the optimum solutions have been replaced from time to time and the causal connections between various discoveries.

I see expressed frequently opinions that old scientific and technical publications are obsolete, but in my opinion this is very naive.

The optimum technology or algorithm for solving a certain problem changes when improvements are done in some different domains. However the range of kinds of solutions for a given problem is usually finite, so when the optimum solution changes in time it may necessarily change to a kind of solution that has already been used in the past.

Because of this, it is very frequent to see claims about the discovery of "new" things, where the so-called "new" things were well known and widely used some decades ago, or even much earlier.

The worst is not the time wasted with the rediscovery of old things, but the fact that the rediscoveries are usually incomplete, without also rediscovering the finer points about which are their most efficient variants and which are their limitations, which may make them non-applicable in certain contexts.

Knowing a detailed technical and scientific history avoids such cases.