It's hard to know -- but something that definitely struck me was that we at Sun did much better technical work in the bust (2001-2005) than the boom (1997-2001)

It's hard to know -- but something that definitely struck me was that we at Sun did much better technical work in the bust (2001-2005) than the boom (1997-2001). (It's hard to say anything definitive about this as there is so much there that's specific to Sun and the group of technologists I was working with, but it certainly didn't make me long for the boom!) As for the progression of software development, this may be trite to say, but in my opinion the single most important revolution in software is the rise of open source. I don't think that there was a single event here per se but rather a multi-decade long progression across many different domains that has changed just about every single aspect of software development. (Cloud computing too, certainly -- but I don't think that cloud computing is economically viable without open source.) So software development from the 1990s is unrecognizable in large part because it is just so damned proprietary -- which, as it turns out, was in fact a relatively short blip in the fullness of history.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk, in which I expand a bit on the history of open source, among other things