Significant new inventions in computing since 1980

Answer 1

Outside of hardware innovations, I tend to find that there is little or nothing new under the sun. Most of the really big ideas date back to people like von Neumann and Alan Turing.

A lot of things that are labelled 'technology' these days are really just a program or library somebody wrote, or a retread of an old idea with a new metaphor, acronym, or brand name.

Answer 2

To address the two questions about "Why the death of new ideas", and "what to do about it"?

I suspect a lot of the lack of progress is due to the massive influx of capital and entrenched wealth in the industry. Sounds counterintuitive, but I think it's become conventional wisdom that any new idea gets one shot; if it doesn't make it at the first try, it can't come back. It gets bought by someone with entrenched interests, or just FAILs, and the energy is gone. A couple examples are tablet computers, and integrated office software. The Newton and several others had real potential, but ended up (through competitive attrition and bad judgment) squandering their birthrights, killing whole categories. (I was especially fond of Ashton Tate's Framework; but I'm still stuck with Word and Excel).

What to do? The first thing that comes to mind is Wm. Shakespeare's advice: "Let's kill all the lawyers." But now they're too well armed, I'm afraid. I actually think the best alternative is to find an Open Source initiative of some kind. They seem to maintain accessibility and incremental improvement better than the alternatives. But the industry has gotten big enough so that some kind of organic collaborative mechanism is necessary to get traction.

I also think that there's a dynamic that says that the entrenched interests (especially platforms) require a substantial amount of change - churn - to justify continuing revenue streams; and this absorbs a lot of creative energy that could have been spent in better ways. Look how much time we spend treading water with the newest iteration from Microsoft or Sun or Linux or Firefox, making changes to systems that for the most part work fine already. It's not because they are evil, it's just built into the industry. There's no such thing as Stable Equilibrium; all the feedback mechanisms are positive, favoring change over stability. (Did you ever see a feature withdrawn, or a change retracted?)

The other clue that has been discussed on SO is the Skunkworks Syndrome (ref: Geoffrey Moore): real innovation in large organizations almost always (90%+) shows up in unauthorized projects that emerge spontaneously, fueled exclusively by individual or small group initiative (and more often than not opposed by formal management hierarchies). So: Question Authority, Buck the System.

Answer 3

DNS, 1983, and dependent advances like email host resolution via MX records instead of bang-paths. *shudder*

Zeroconf working on top of DNS, 2000. I plug my printer into the network and my laptop sees it. I start a web server on the network and my browser sees it. (Assuming they broadcast their availability.)

NTP (1985) based on Marzullo's algorithm (1984). Accurate time over jittery networks.

The mouse scroll wheel, 1995. Using mice without it feels so primitive. And no, it's not something that Engelbart's team thought of and forgot to mention. At least not when I asked someone who was on the team at the time. (It was at some Engelbart event in 1998 or so. I got to handle one of the first mice.)

Unicode, 1987, and its dependent advances for different types of encoding, normalization, bidirectional text, etc.

Yes, it's pretty common for people to use all 5 of these every day.

Are these "really new ideas?" After all, there were mice, there were character encodings, there was network timekeeping. Tell me how I can distinguish between "new" and "really new" and I'll answer that one for you. My intuition says that these are new enough.

In smaller domains there are easily more recent advances. In bioinformatics, for example, Smith-Waterman (1981) and more especially BLAST (1990) effectively make the field possible. But it sounds like you're asking for ideas which are very broad across the entire field of computing, and the low-hanging fruit gets picked first. Thus is it always with a new field.

Answer 4

Computer Worms were researched in the early eighties of the last century in the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

From John Shoch's and Jon Hupp's The "Worm" Programs - Early Experience with a Distributed Computation" (Communications of the ACM, March 1982 Volume 25 Number 3, pp.172-180, march 1982):

In The Shockwave Rider, J. Brunner developed the notion of an omnipotent "tapeworm" program running loose through a network of computers - an idea which may seem rather disturbing, but which is also quite beyond our current capabilities. The basic model, however, remains a very provocative one: a program or a computation that can move from machine to machine, harnessing resources as needed, and replicating itself when necessary.

In a similar vein, we once described a computational model based upon the classic science-fiction film, The Blob: a program that started out running in one machine, but as its appetite for computing cycles grew, it could reach out, find unused machines, and grow to encompass those resources. In the middle of the night, such a program could mobilize hundreds of machines in one building; in the morning, as users reclaimed their machines, the "blob" would have to retreat in an orderly manner, gathering up the intermediate results of its computation. Holed up in one or two machines during the day, the program could emerge again later as resources became available, again expanding the computation. (This affinity for nighttime exploration led one researcher to describe these as "vampire programs.")

Quoting Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Answer 5

I started programming Jan 2nd 1980. I've tried to think about significant new inventions over my career. I struggle to think of any. Most of what I consider significant were actually invented prior to 1980 but then weren't widely adopted or improved until after.

1. Graphical User Interface.
2. Fast processing.
3. Large memory (I paid $200.00 for 16k in 1980).
4. Small sizes - cell phones, pocket pc's, iPhones, Netbooks.
5. Large storage capacities. (I've gone from carrying a large 90k floppy to an 8 gig usb thumb drive.
6. Multiple processors. (Almost all my computers have more than one now, software struggles to keep them busy).
7. Standard interfaces (like USB) to easily attach hardware peripherals.
8. Multiple Touch displays.
9. Network connectivity - leading to the mid 90's internet explosion.
10. IDE's with Intellisense and incremental compiling.

While the hardware has improved tremendously the software industry has struggled to keep up. We are light years ahead of 1980, but most improvements have been refinements rather than inventions. Since 1980 we have been too busy applying what the advancements let us do rather than inventing. By themselves most of these incremental inventions are not important or powerful, but when you look back over the last 29 years they are quite powerful.

We probably need to embrace the incremental improvements and steer them. I believe that truly original ideas will probably come from people with little exposure to computers and they are becoming harder to find.

Answer 6

JIT compilation was invented in the late 1980s.