有目的的游戏——像Luis von Ahn和他的团队正在开发的集体智慧工具在1980年之前可能是一个梦想，但当时没有一个广泛部署的网络，可以容纳数百万人，并且需要(例如reCAPTCHA)来实现它。

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.

传感器网络:非常微小的(纳米级)计算机形成自组织p2p网络并传输“传感”信息。

3D打印:物理对象的《星际迷航》复制器(还没有Early Grey茶)。

DNA计算:针对某些类型问题的大规模并行计算。

开放的PC设计带来了价格实惠的组件(苹果除外)，竞争推动了创新和更低的价格。 这导致了巨大的变化，从用户走向电脑——那里有一个终端可以使用——到电脑来到用户面前，出现在家里，甚至在一个人的大腿上。

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。

USB