一些回答提到了量子计算机，好像它们还在遥远的未来，但我不敢苟同。

There were vague mentions of possibility of quantum computers in 1970s and 1980s (see timeline on Wikipedia), however the first "working" 3-qubit NMR quantum computer was built in 1998. The field is still in infancy, and almost all progress is still theoretical and confined to academia, but in 2007 company called D-Wave Systems presented a prototype of a working 16-qubit, and later during the year 28-qubit adiabatic quantum computer. Their effort is notable since they claim that their technology is commercially viable and scalable. As of 2010, they have 7 rigs, current generation of their chips has 128 qubits. They seem to have partnered with Google to find interesting problems to test their hardware on.

我推荐这段简短的24分钟视频和维基百科上关于D-Wave的文章作为快速概述，在这个由D-Wave创始人和首席财务官撰写的博客上有更多的资源。

低成本/家用电脑。直到20世纪80年代初，人们(至少在布莱蒂)才真正听说过这件事。如果没有家用计算机，有多少人会把计算机作为一种职业?甚至把它当作一种爱好?

就我自己而言，如果我的父母没有在1982/1983年得到Clive Sincliar的简陋的橡胶键盘ZX Spectrum，我现在可能不会在这里。这不仅仅是演讲:C64、Vic-20、Acorn Electron、BBC A/B/Master、Oric-1、Dragon-32等等都为家用电脑市场注入了活力，并使每一个拥有一台电脑的8岁男孩和女孩都成为了程序员。

如果这不是计算和编程方面的革命，我就不知道什么是……!

另外一个好奇的问题是:在这个网站上，业余程序员和职业程序员的区别是什么?我知道这些数据没有经过整理，但可能会很有趣。

过去30年里处理器速度的大幅提升不容忽视。各种聪明的想法，如流水线和抢占式分支，以及处理器设计电子方面的改进，意味着今天的程序员可以更多地担心程序的设计和可维护性，而不必担心计算时钟周期。

软件:

虚拟化和仿真 P2P数据传输 社区驱动的项目，如维基百科、SETI@home…… 网络爬行和网络搜索引擎，即索引信息分布在世界各地

硬件:

模块化PC 电子纸

有一件事让我吃惊，那就是简陋的电子表格。非程序员的人用一个简单的公式网格就可以为现实世界的问题构建狂野而奇妙的解决方案。在桌面应用程序中复制他们的努力通常需要比编写电子表格多10到100倍的时间，最终的应用程序通常更难使用，充满bug !

我相信电子表格成功的关键是自动依赖分析。如果电子表格的用户被迫使用观察者模式，他们就没有机会得到正确的结果。

因此，最大的进步是自动依赖分析。现在，为什么没有任何现代平台(Java， .Net, Web Services)将其构建到系统的核心中呢?特别是在一个通过并行化扩展的时代——依赖关系图导致并行重新计算变得微不足道。

编辑:我刚查过。VisiCalc发布于1979年——让我们假设它是1980年后的发明。

Edit2:似乎艾伦已经注意到了电子表格——如果让他来这个论坛的问题是正确的!

回答“为什么新思想会消亡”和“如何应对”这两个问题?

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).

怎么办呢?首先想到的是Wm。莎士比亚的建议:“让我们杀了所有的律师。”但恐怕他们现在装备太精良了。实际上，我认为最好的选择是找到某种开源计划。它们似乎比其他选择更好地保持可访问性和增量改进。但是这个行业已经变得足够大了，所以某种有机的合作机制是必要的。

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?)

关于SO的另一个讨论线索是臭鼬工厂综合症(参考:Geoffrey Moore):在大型组织中，真正的创新几乎总是(90%以上)出现在自发出现的未经授权的项目中，这些项目完全由个人或小团队的主动性推动(通常会受到正式的管理等级的反对)。所以:质疑权威，反抗体制。