Brendan Gregg's Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery (via, and) is about both the definition and the history of load average calculations in Linux. Specifically:

Load averages are an industry-critical metric – my company spends millions auto-scaling cloud instances based on them and other metrics – but on Linux there's some mystery around them. Linux load averages track not just runnable tasks, but also tasks in the uninterruptible sleep state. Why? I've never seen an explanation. In this post I'll solve this mystery, and summarize load averages as a reference for everyone trying to interpret them.

In the process of doing this, Brendan Gregg goes back to TENEX (including its source code) for the more or less original load average. Then he chases down the kernel patch from October 1993 that changed Linux's load averages from purely based on the size of the run queue to including processes in disk wait. It goes on from there, including some great examples of how to break down a load average to see what's contributing what (using modern Linux tracing tools, which Gregg is an expert on). The whole thing is really impressive and worth reading.

(Gregg's discussion is focused on Linux alone. For a cross-Unix view, I've written entries on when the load average was added to Unix and the many load averages of different Unix strains. In the latter entry I confidently asserted that Linux's load average included 'disk wait' processes from the start, which Gregg's research has revealed to be wrong.)