Is History Important to Digital Culture??

The digital culture we have today owes everything to the history of the technology it utilises. To have an understanding of the past, how and why technologies were developed helps us to appreciate how and why we got to where we are today.
Without everything that came before would we have what we do today?
I don't think we would. History can give us a view of developments of the past, e.g. the birth of the internet, the invention of hypertext or the mouse. It constantly gives us new bases on which to build and push towards bigger and better technologies and ideas. It could be said that we shouldnt dwell on the past, but look to the future. In this sense having an understanding of the past may not be important. Only knowldege of what we have now and how it can be improved is important.
I don't agree with that view, I think a prime example against the view we should only look forward and disregard the past, is the 'touch screen'.
The touch screen is a technology we see almost everywhere now. We see them at information desks, shopping centre maps, in classrooms, at home and in the hands and pockets of the majority of the population in the UK. Someone ignoring the history would believe this was a new technology. However the people who developed it took a retrospective view on technology and would know it holds its roots strongly in the brainchild of Ivan Sutherland who in 1963 invented 'Sketchpad' a user interface widely agreed to be the predecessor to the modern day 'touch screen'. So the future of graphical user interfaces was a development of a technology over 50 years old, imagine if we had disregarded this as something of the past.....

History can also give us a view on problems and mistakes of the past. Because of this, history is important as it allows us to learn from what's gone before to help us both in the present and the future.
So is history important to digital culture? the simple answer is yes!