"The Morning Paper" did a series in September on a bunch of older papers from the 70s about system design. https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/page/3/
As an example, https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-us... is just as relevant now as it was then. It shocks me over and over to find papers like that one; we as an industry seem to miss and forget the lessons that our forebearers learned.
My colleagues were always astonished at my "brilliance". It didn't matter that I referenced the paper in the code and even brandished the hardcopy (thats what we had in those days) -- it was inconceivable that I might have found something in the literature and made more sense that they were working with a "genius".
When I moved into Pharma 20 years later it was the opposite: we would find interesting and relevant results in papers more than 20 years old.
This not only applies to simple things such as coding a paper's algorithms to test it out, but can be manifested as a refusal to read old literature to avoid making the same mistakes people did decades ago.
I don't understand this part -- do you mean the past has nothing to teach the present?
