互联网。

就是这样。

个人电脑。

毫无疑问，在过去的30年里，计算最重要的部分是现在每个人都是它的一部分。家用电脑大约从1977年才开始普及，直到80年代才得到广泛应用。现在，幼儿园、老年中心和你的每个邻居都有一台。

当然，1980年以前是施乐PARC的辉煌时期。在图形用户界面、鼠标、激光打印机、互联网和个人电脑刚刚诞生的时候。(鉴于我太年轻了，不可能活在那个年代，而你几乎在努力发明所有这些东西，关于1980年的事情，我不能告诉你任何你不知道的事情，所以我们继续吧。)

The thing is, though, that the pre-1980 days were 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.

幸运的是，这可能会发生在一些领域，而且已经发生在其他一些领域:

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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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) would be bigger than anything the human race has accomplished before. GNU + Linux 3D printing / rapid prototyping (and, in time, manufacturing) P2P (which also lead to VoIP etc.) E-ink, once the technologies mature a bit more RFID might belong on the list, but the verdict is still out on that one 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. 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.

光学计算。似乎它应该存在更长的时间，但我目前找不到任何早于1982年的参考资料(相关技术，光学晶体管，直到1986年才出现)。

量子计算的数学在1980年之前就已经出现了，但硬件还没有出现，而且在未来许多年里可能在物理和经济上都不可行。

DNS, 1983年，以及依赖的进步，如通过MX记录而不是刘海路径来解析电子邮件主机。*不寒而栗*

Zeroconf工作在DNS之上，2000年。我把我的打印机插入网络，我的笔记本电脑看到了它。我在网络上启动了一个web服务器，我的浏览器看到了它。(假设他们广播了他们的可用性。)

NTP(1985)基于Marzullo算法(1984)。精确的时间在紧张的网络。

鼠标滚轮，1995年。使用没有它的鼠标感觉太原始了。不，这不是恩格尔巴特团队想过却忘了提的东西。至少当我问当时团队里的人时没有。(那是1998年左右在恩格尔巴特的一次活动上。我要对付第一批老鼠中的一只。)

1987年的Unicode，以及它在不同类型的编码、规范化、双向文本等方面的相关进展。

是的，人们每天使用这5种方法是很常见的。

这些真的是“新想法”吗?毕竟，有了鼠标，有了字符编码，有了网络计时。告诉我如何区分“新”和“真正的新”，我会回答你的问题。我的直觉告诉我这些足够新了。

在较小的领域，很容易有更近期的进展。例如，在生物信息学领域，Smith-Waterman(1981)和BLAST(1990)有效地使该领域成为可能。但这听起来像是你在要求在整个计算领域中非常广泛的想法，而且容易摘到的水果会被先摘。在一个新的领域总是如此。