I'm still staggered by it, and I watched it happen, too. Several times in my computing career -- say, from 1990 on -- I've seen something start to happen that

I'm still staggered by it, and I watched it happen, too. Several times in my computing career -- say, from 1990 on -- I've seen something start to happen that was clearly going to be huge, only to be told over and over that the obviously-inevitable development was Impossible. The first example was the ascendancy of the microcomputer. "OH, there will ALWAYS be a space for mainframes! Corporations aren't going to do their accounting on some crappy PC! You're just young and don't see how these things really work." The second was the way Linux completely destroyed the commercial Unix market (and, with it, the "fancy Unix workstation" market). The power of FOSS is, in my view, very very often overstated by idealists, but it's hard not to see the wholesale corporate/academic/research shift from Solaris, et. al., to Linux on commodity hardware as anything but a HUGE win in terms of computing power.