I don't think you're picking on me, and I wasn't trying to suggest that such a question is cultural bias. What I meant is just that people in general tend to think the things they know about are the most interesting things, and that people who don't know about those things are deficient. But by definition they can't know about things they don't know about, which may be just as interesting. So my proposed replacement question just acknowledges and tries to work around that phenomenon. I doubt it is actually critical for people to be super familiar with Tannenbaum's work specifically, it is just an indirect way of assessing intellectual curiosity and CS chops, which I think my question would also achieve.
I pretty much agree with everything else you said, and I wish I knew more about the history of computing myself, since I've lost a lot of my memory of my college course on it to the sands of time. I wonder if there's a good survey book. Maybe AST wrote one...
I pretty much agree with everything else you said, and I wish I knew more about the history of computing myself, since I've lost a lot of my memory of my college course on it to the sands of time. I wonder if there's a good survey book. Maybe AST wrote one...