an easy way to read golden-age papers (say, 01952–01972) that don't have attention drawn to them today is to look at the other papers in the same issue of the journal that had some well-known paper in it

when i've done this i've found that most of the papers present trivial and wrongheaded approaches, just like most papers today, but they're still a lot more pleasant to read because they're much better written; however, it's much slower going because the terminology is pretty alien

they also have much shorter lists of references but of course they didn't have bibtex