The top answer to Alan Kay's question on SO Significant new inventions in computing since 1980 innovation https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant

The top answer to Alan Kay's question on SO Significant new inventions in computing since 1980 innovation https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i... is the Web. And TFA argues the Web caused innovation to be pushed out by adoption and application aka solving actual people's problems aka money. So that fits. [ TFA's date of 1996 just freezes the surface tech that got swept into power by the web, e.g. Java was deliberately not innovative, but a "blue-collar language". ] Of course, it is possible that all the foundational stuff has already been done. It happened to physics, why not us?