I haven't worked professionally since 1995, so my example will seems too obvious. It's hard to believe how drastically things have changed and how our expectat

I haven't worked professionally since 1995, so my example will seems too obvious. It's hard to believe how drastically things have changed and how our expectations have changed. My most striking work was finished in 1989. Any mildly competent programmer could use a framework to do what I did today. I had to carve my own framework out of a block of wood. Maybe I exaggerate a little bit. Yet, creating that framework wasn't really difficult. The technology (dynamic color graphics and mouse monitoring) had been around for a few years. We had a data base of polygons representing the boundaries of geological formations, a data base of mineral deposits, and an extensible data base program (4D). I wrote extensions to display interactive geologic maps on a mac screen. The user did a search for mineral deposits of interest. The mac displayed their locations on a custom map. When the user clicked on a location, the mac displayed the complete data record for the deposit. The user could get similar information for other objects displayed, e.g. faults, Forest Service boundaries... Believe it or not the USGS national headquarters was actually considering waking up Ronald Regan to show him what we could do. Times have changed. Most GUI apps at that time were pretty static. Click on a button. Type into a text field. Click on a text link. Drag a rectangle... Complex displays that were custom created for the user and that contained deep information were largely unknown. "Programmers did not do things like that." While I had great respect for those guys, they were self-limited by their expectations. The very real demands for small footprints and fast execution times imposed by hardware and software limitations of the past few decades had been so binding on the profession's expectations that few of us realized we were unnecessarily limiting our imaginations. Times had changed. The first time this app ran, it took 26 minutes. It did not matter. That's what the others missed. Any passing similar inspirations (and I'm sure many had them) were immediately rejected as unrealistically slow, too futuristic to consider practical. I think that our expectations are still limited by excessive concern for efficiency. I admit that programmers working in a production environment have little or no choice in the matter. There, creativity is properly focused on obtaining efficiency. The big question is what marvelous innovations are our current perspectives grounded in the past hiding from us, innovations that in the future will be considered mundane.