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!

软件专利

我认为计算中的大多数概念都在不断改进，但也有一些新的发展，特别是在分布式计算方面。

对故障和缺陷的鲁棒性，以及故障恢复，即。Paxos，拜占庭容错等。 我知道人们提到过P2P, P2P通信发生在70年代，但恕我直言，我不认为它具有与今天相同的性质，具有分布式哈希表，高效的动态自组织网络，最重要的是，匿名性(例如Freenet, Tor)。

大多数工作都经过了改进，虽然许多现代系统比60年代或更早时候首次描述的原始概念好不了多少，但有些系统好了几个数量级。

I'd say the biggest trend is an ever increasing lack of location dependence and pervasiveness. An interesting philosophical exercise these days is to count the computers in you immediate area. They're everywhere desktops, keyboards, microwaves, radios, televisions, cell phones etc... My grandmother computer is illiterate however her life is as infested with small computers as everyone else's. She can make a call to me from the middle of an empty field. I can then answer that call zipping down the highway.

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.

自1980年以来，关于社会计算的想法已经取得了进展。油井工程始于1985年。虽然我确信以前有在线社区，但我相信该领域的一些真正的见解发生在1980年之后。社会社区的不利动态方面及其在软件系统上的交互很像塔科马海峡大桥的灾难。

我认为Clay Shirky在该领域的工作阐明了这些影响以及如何减轻它们。我想说，社交软件洞察力的有趣的现实世界的例子包括reCAPTCHA和维基百科，其中重要的有价值的工作是由软件调解的参与者完成的。