Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

Definitely missing from this list:

J. Cooley and J. Tukey, “An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series,” 1965

Great list of papers.

I've read five of of the seven papers on the list. The two I haven't read are Cerf and Kahn's, and Berner-Lee's.

Turing's paper on computability was particularly hard to follow, for me, because he used these gothic-font upper-chase characters to name all sorts of objects, and all those characters looked kinda the same to me! I had to use auxiliary materials to be able to make my way through the paper. Today, I would recommend reading it with Charles Petzold's easy-to-follow book on the paper: https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...

Cook's paper on NP-completeness was also hard to follow (again, for me). As with Turing's paper, I had to use auxiliary materials to make my way. Today, I would recommend reading instead an introductory book on computational complexity that works through Cook's proof.

Shannon's paper is a work of art, clearly articulated and beautifully written. It's just not casual reading, to put it mildly.

Brin and Page's paper, and Codd's paper, are not hard to follow, at least as I remember them, but understanding Brin and Page's work requires some knowledge of Linear Algebra.

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

Surprised the Bitcoin paper isn't on here.

It would be interesting to see the opposite of this; which papers are really interesting and look useful, but did not end up having a significant impact?

I wonder how someone could make such a list and completely ignore cryptography. No, it is not enough to mention NP-completeness.

I went with some cynicism. But completely wrong. These are it. Most every one recognisable as the root of many things we do.