Progress is supposed to work by standing on the shoulder of giants. But that only works if engineers are aware of what came before, how it worked, what was good and bad about it.
In the software world the same things are continuously being reinvented but the lessons of the past are not integrated because the inventors have no knowledge of the past 10 times the same thing was done. So every lesson has to be learned anew in production. That's not progress.
A very very good paper, and one that was clearly a passion project for the prof.
Additionaly the campus library was a treasure trove from computing books all the way back in time, and many of us dived into them.
But it was an elective, and as I found once I got into the real world, one that most people either opted out of or didn't have the option to take. I spend way too much time providing Cliff's Notes to a class I took almost thirty years ago.