I've long been a proponent of computing history as required part of CS.

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.

I had something like that, that is how I upgraded myself from a UNIX zealot into a Xerox PARC one, as I discovered an alternative universe.

Additionaly the campus library was a treasure trove from computing books all the way back in time, and many of us dived into them.

Some places have them. I took an elective class at university which focused on open source philosophy & licenses. Read and discussed a bunch of papers written by the guys involved in the early open source movement. Stopped short of code review though: which would have been a nice addition.

A very very good paper, and one that was clearly a passion project for the prof.