The last entry is 1979, which happens to coincide with the year of my birth. Apparently I am the final product of computer science research, and there is nothi

The last entry is 1979, which happens to coincide with the year of my birth. Apparently I am the final product of computer science research, and there is nothing left to discover? Anyways, it's an interesting question what ought to be on this list if it continued to the present. Something blockchain related, probably. And something machine learning related. There's been a lot of progress in programming language design and theory, producing Haskell, Rust, Agda, Idris, etc.. The Linux kernel also appeared in that time, though there's not that much that's fundamentally revolutionary about Linux from a computer science perspective (just a lot of little things). Along with Linux there was the rise of free / open source software. I'd put the original paper describing Google on that list. Bittorrent maybe -- some of the other proper DHT's are more interesting, but bittorrent is what actually worked for a lot of people. Whitted's ray tracing paper is from 1979. That's had a big impact on graphics (and probably an even bigger one going forward). Then there was path tracing, and photon mapping, and the study of building and efficiently traversing bounding volume hierarchies which is what makes ray tracing computationally tractable. FFTs are another technology that's been pretty relevant in modern times, though the idea has apparently been around a lot longer than 1979.