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copied!<p>The pre-1980 days were, of course, the glory days of Xerox PARC. Back when the GUI, the mouse, the laser printer, the internet, and the personal computer were all being created. (Seeing as I'm too young to have been alive back then, and you were pretty much working on inventing all of those, I can't tell you anything about 1980 that you don't already know, so let's move on.)</p> <p>The thing is, though, that the pre-1980 days <em>were</em> a lot more vibrant in terms of truly disruptive new technologies. That's the way it is with any new field -- hwo many game-changing technology advances have you seen in railroads in the past 100 years? How many have you seen in lightbulbs? In the printing press? Once something ignites a hype in the right circles, there is an explosive period of invention, followed by a long period of maturing. After that, you're not going to see the same kind of completely radical changes again UNLESS the basic circumstances change.</p> <p>Luckily, that might be happening in a number of fields, and it has already happened in a few others:</p> <ul> <li><p>Mobility - smart phones bring computing to a truly portable platform, which will soon include location-based services and proximity-based ad-hoc networks. It's a completely new paradigm that's potentially as game-changing as the GUI has been</p></li> <li><p>The WWW (HTTP, HTML and DNS) has already been mentioned and is an obvious addition to the list, since it is enabling global, inexpensive, mainstream rich communication across the globe - all thanks to a computing platform</p></li> <li><p>On the interface side, both touch, multitouch (Jeff Han comes to mind) and the Wiimote need mentioning. Currently, they are basically curiosities, but so were the early GUIs.</p></li> <li><p>OOP design patterns -- higher level solutions as best practices to hard problems. Depending on your definition of 'computing', it may or may not belong on the list, but if you count OOP as a significant advance pre-1980 (I certainly do), I think design patterns and the GoF deserve a mention too</p></li> <li><p>Google's PageRank and MapReduce algorithms - I am pleased to notice I wasn't the first to mention them, and seriously --- where would the world be without the principles of both of them? I vividly remember what the world looked like before them, and suffice it to say Google really IS my friend.</p></li> <li><p>Non-volatile memory -- it's on the hardware side, but it is going to play a significant role in the future of computing - making bootup times a thing of the past, for example, and enabling us to use computers in entirely new ways</p></li> <li><p>Semantic (natural language) search / analysis / classification / translation... We're not quite there yet, but companies like Powerset give the impression that we're on the brink.</p></li> <li><p>On that note, intelligent HTMs should be on this list as well. I am yet another believer in Jeff Hawkins' model and approach, and if it works, it will mean a complete redefinition of what computers can do, what it means to be human, and where the world can go from here. Creating a real intelligence in that way (synthetically) <em>would</em> be bigger than anything the human race has accomplished before.</p></li> <li><p>GNU + Linux</p></li> <li><p>3D printing / rapid prototyping (and, in time, manufacturing)</p></li> <li><p>P2P (which also lead to VoIP etc.)</p></li> <li><p>E-ink, once the technologies mature a bit more</p></li> <li><p>RFID might belong on the list, but the verdict is still out on that one</p></li> <li><p>Quantum Computing is the most obvious element on the list, except we still haven't been able to get enough qubits to play along. However, my friends in the field tell me there's incredible progress going on even as we speak, so I'm holding my breath for that one.</p></li> <li><p>And finally, I want to mention a personal favourite: distributed intelligence, or its other name: artificial artificial intelligence. The idea of connecting a huge number of people in a network and allowing them access to the combined minds of everyone else through some form of question answering interface. It's been done a number of times recently, with Yahoo Answers, Askville, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and so on, but in my mind, those are all missing the mark by a LOT... much like the many implementations of distributed hypertext that came before Tim Berners-Lee's HTML, or the many web crawlers before Google. Seriously -- someone needs to build an search interface into 'the hive mind' to blow everyone else out of the water. IMHO - it is only a matter of time.</p></li> </ul>

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