>(coax, ethernet, token ring etc.) Well, some things did bring improvements, or new ways of thinking about existing problems, and some things really moved the

>(coax, ethernet, token ring etc.) Well, some things did bring improvements, or new ways of thinking about existing problems, and some things really moved the state of the art. Taking your example of token ring -> coax (with terminators,eek!) -> ethernet is arguably a good progression (and now also wifi). But there's also lots of churn in software and people solving the same problems in slightly different ways. However ... this is also collateral damage from another improvement, imho - that is the ceding of control of the tech landscape from big companies (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Intel, Sun, Borland) to smaller open source clusters of people and VC funding. There was a time when nothing happened without some big tech company behind it, and everybody waited for (particularly MS) to bless things and provide library support, IDEs and tools. Those days are over, but the result is a bazaar of nosql servers, messaging servers, languages and front-end JS frameworks.