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In typing class there was a good reason for it. All except the most expensive typewriters were monospace, and you really need that extra space for your eye to pick out the beginning of a sentence.
Since monospace type is now a rarity, that's no longer necessary -- proportional space text already adds more space after a period. Not a full second space, but more. Typesetters had been doing this for centuries -- it was only the limitations of those old typewriters that made the second space "the standard." We've canonized a workaround.
I confess my fingers automatically hit two spaces at the end of a sentence, but in most cases it doesn't matter since most of the text I type is in formats (html, TeX, etc.) that ignore extra space and "do the right thing."
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