Significant new inventions in computing since 1980

Answer 1

HTM systems (Hiearchical Temporal Memory).

A new approach to Artifical Intelligence, initiated by Jeff Hawkins through the book "On Intelligence".

Now active as a company called Numenta where these ideas are put to the test through development of "true" AI, with an invitation to the community to participate by using the system through SDKs.

It's more about building machine intelligence from the ground up, rather than trying to emulate human reasoning.

Answer 2

The use of Physics in Human Computer interaction to provide an alternative, understandable metaphor. This combined with gestures and haptics will likely result in a replacment for the current common GUI metaphor invented in the 70's and in common use since the mid to late 80's.

The computing power wasn't present in 1980 to make that possible. I believe Games likely led the way here. An example can easily be seen in the interaction of list scrolling in the iPod Touch/iPhone. The interaction mechanism relies on the intuition of how momentum and friction work in the real world to provide a simple way to scroll a list of items, and the usability relies on the physical gesture that cause the scroll.

Answer 3

Mobile phones.

While the first "wireless phone" patent was in 1908, and they were cooking for a long time (0G in 1945, 1G launched in Japan in 1979), modern 2G digital cell phones didn't appear until 1991. SMS didn't exist until 1993, and Internet access appeared in 1999.

Answer 4

Damas-Milner type inference (often called Hindley-Milner type inference) was published in 1983 and has been the basis of every sophisticated static type system since. It was a genuinely new idea in programming languages (admitted based on ideas published in the 1970s, but not made practical until after 1980). In terms of importance I put it up with Self and the techniques used to implement Self; in terms of influence it has no peer. (The rest of the OO world is still doing variations on Smalltalk or Simula.)

Variations on type inference are still playing out; the variation I would single out the most is Wadler and Blott's type class mechanism for resolving overloading, which was later discovered to offer very powerful mechanisms for programming at the type level. The end to this story is still being written.

Answer 5

Tagging, the way information is categorized. Yes, the little boxes of text under each question.

It is amazing that it took about 30 years to invent tagging. We used lists and tables of contents; we used things which are optimized for printed books.

However 30 years is much shorter than the time people needed to realize that printed books can be in smaller format. People can keep books in hands.

I think that the tagging concept is underestimated among core CS guys. All research is focused on natural language processing (top-down approach). But tagging is the first language in which computers and people can both understand well. It is a bottom-up approach that makes computers use natural languages.

Answer 6

Better user interfaces.

Today’s user interfaces still suck. And I don't mean in small ways but in large, fundamental ways. I can't help but to notice that even the best programs still have interfaces that are either extremely complex or that require a lot of abstract thinking in other ways, and that just don't approach the ease of conventional, non-software tools.

Granted, this is due to the fact that software allows to do so much more than conventional tools. That's no reason to accept the status quo though. Additionally, most software is simply not well done.

In general, applications still lack a certain “just works” feeling are too much oriented by what can be done, rather than what should be done. One point that has been raised time and again, and that is still not solved, is the point of saving. Applications crash, destroying hours of work. I have the habit of pressing Ctrl+S every few seconds (of course, this no longer works in web applications). Why do I have to do this? It's mind-numbingly stupid. This is clearly a task for automation. Of course, the application also has to save a diff for every modification I make (basically an infinite undo list) in case I make an error.

Solving this probem isn't even actually hard. It would just be hard to implement it in every application since there is no good API to do this. Programming tools and libraries have to improve significantly before allowing an effortless implementation of such effords across all platforms and programs, for all file formats with arbitrary backup storage and no required user interaction. But it is a necessary step before we finally start writing “good” applications instead of merely adequate ones.

I believe that Apple currently approximates the “just works” feeling best in some regards. Take for example their newest version of iPhoto which features a face recognition that automatically groups photos by people appearing in them. That is a classical task that the user does not want to do manually and doesn't understand why the computer doesn't do it automatically. And even iPhoto is still a very long way from a good UI, since said feature still requires ultimate confirmation by the user (for each photo!), since the face recognition engine isn't perfect.