> underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have [...] I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon I wasn't alive at the time, so I don'

> underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have [...] I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon I wasn't alive at the time, so I don't know how small/fringe the lisp community was at the time, but your comment made me think of how lisp "invented" things like if-then-else, recursion, garbage collection, first-class functions and more, which we more or less take for granted in every programming language today (at least some of those features), although lisp and lisp-likes remain fringe today. The same pattern seems to be repeating even in modern times where things like React/Redux/hot code reloading were heavily inspired by what the ClojureScript (a lisp-like compile-to-JS language) community was experimenting with at the time, if I remember correctly.