I hear this notion bandied about once in a while. I don't think it's strictly true. It's just something you say to express frustration about things you don't l

I hear this notion bandied about once in a while. I don't think it's strictly true. It's just something you say to express frustration about things you don't like broadly like about tech, by comparing it to an idealized version of the past. There were plenty of frivolous things back in the 60's. We just don't remember them as no one wrote about it that survived so we can read it. As for some modern-day people doing progressive work in computing that should change how we compute in the future--a couple come to mind: Bret Victor and others (along with Alan Kay) in the YCR HARC lab are carrying on in the same tradition with Dynamiclang.org. Chris Granger at Eve is also exploring some of these new old ideas and trying to push programming forward. In Neural Networks, there's George Hinton that helped push Deep Learning into the forefront of Machine Learning. (And others whose names I can't remember) Personally, I'd also put Juan Benet of Protocol Labs and Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum in this group. The former built IPFS and FileCoin, and the latter built Ethereum. Out of everyone I've read and watched talks and listened to interviews about cryptocurrenies, they seem the most concerned about its potential for computing in the future.