For learning rhetoric, imitatio and aemulatio was considered important throughout history. That you would imitate an excellent speaker (copy a speech to learn the ropes) and emulate (absorb their character and maybe outshine them).
See how Edward Jenner invented it and you understand what a vaccine is. It could easily slot into definitions of holistic and naturopathic medicine. Ironic, considering current political discourse.
It started with Babbage's computation engine, which was all theory. Ada Lovelace figured out that programming could have wide applications. But it really started with the creation of the transistor at Bell Labs, for miniaturizing hearing aids, which happened to make computers practical to build. Come World War II, the first computer was built, named the ENIAC, funded because the army wanted calculate artillery firing tables.
At the same time, the Manhattan Project (for developing the atomic bomb) had many geniuses working at Los Alamos, who became so interested in the ENIAC that their stories intertwine. The first program it ran was to check the feasibility of H-bombs. Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam programmed it to do Monte Carlo calculations at some point.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Alan Turing, John von Neumann and some others were huge figures in determining how to build a computer. Conceiving of pseudorandom number generators and all the other things you need.
Most programmers of early computers were women – and when the world realized that programming was where the important and cool things happened, men moved into the field and it started being a "man's job", something that women supposedly couldn't do.
After WWII, much research was done at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), now legendary because for some decades, physicists got lots and lots of funding at places like them to research whatever they liked (the atomic age made physicists sexy). Computers were these huge machines costing millions, and mainly a research curiosity, hard to justify economically except that the physicists were asking for them. The UNIX operating system was thus partly 'by academics for academics', partly commercial. Bright people like Dennis Ritchie set down fundamental rules for OS development that make it less bug-ridden, what we call the UNIX philosophy.
The US DoD conceived of Arpanet and gave two guys a year to figure out how to make it maximally decentralized. Add Tim Berners-Lee's WWW invention and poof, internet.
Dijkstra, Knuth (TeX and so many things), Steele (Lisp machines), Stallman (GPL), …
Major locations
See old movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Does rhetoric have anything to do with knowledge? The Platonic (Plato's) and a recent-modern view is that it doesn't, that it's merely how you dress knowledge for communication to the unwashed masses who can't or won't absorb the dry logic of a research paper in its naked form, say. Rhetoric is a game of flattery. Despite valuing rhetoric highly, Cicero agreed with this view: rhetoric has nothing to do with the search for knowledge or truth.
A different view, the sophistic view, is that knowledge is produced by rhetoric, and even that knowledge itself is rhetorical. The original sophistry provided both epistemology and ontology: man is the measure of everything and knowledge is utterly dependent on the individual.
I guess the resurging popularity of the sophist viewpoint is related to those postmodern currents in philosophy/epistemology that want to claim that truth itself can be subjective (interpretivism, critical theory, …). These currents set off alarm bells in my head because they're exactly what a creationist would latch on to in order to excuse never changing their mind, or what an useless university department would use to justify its continued funding, or to go darker… violent cults can abuse it as anti-epistemology.
However, there's validity to the idea. Gender is an example of knowledge created by us. It doesn't exist until the word is created. Even objects like people and rocks aren't really delineated from the environment, once you go down to the molecular level.
I guess maps always simplify the territory, and sometimes we start to talk about aspects of the map as if they were aspects of the territory, because between humans, that can really become the case. A belief shared by two or more people is in some sense a real Thing "out there", because of its actual, practical effects on what we do.
Sir Karl Popper saw the sophists as early proponents of an open society, because they emphasised the importance of discussion for decisionmaking.
From a societal perspective, making any kind of improvement, at any scale above literally one-man jobs, depends on both correctness and persuasiveness. […] And you can’t just figure out the right plan first and figure out how to “sell” it later—the process of figuring out the right plan usually requires collaboration along the way. Speaking up about what should be done is an unavoidable element of actually doing it, in most cases. I’m not sure it’s the right move to treat the “steak” and the “sizzle” as totally separate.
See: Lindqvist Ch 2.