From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <200512131804.jBDI4Sd4082659@gate.bitblocks.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] MS Research reinvents Inferno? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 13 Dec 2005 09:49:01 MST."
	<439EFB7D.4050205@lanl.gov> 
From: Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@BitBlocks.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 10:04:28 -0800
Topicbox-Message-UUID: c31a1804-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> There are no real new ideas in CS popping around at this point, so we 
> are reduced to recycling each other's socks. So it goes. We're in an 
> evolutionary, not a revoluationary, business. This may be permanent, it 
> is hard to tell.

Has there been *any* revolutionary idea in CS since mid 1970s?
upto 1975 (in no particular order)
    Monitors
    critical regions
    synchronization primitives
    message passing
    rpc
    object oriented programming
    abstract data types
    garbage collection
    virtual memory
    virtual machines
    network file systems
    capabilities
    networking
    atomic transactions
    relational database
    denotational semantics
    functional programming
    parsing
    hashtables
    various search/sort techniques

the following may be post 1975 (but more likely I am mistaken)
    non blocking synchronization (more than just compare&swap)

My problem is not with reinvention [very few can be in the
right place at the right time with the right kind of brain]
but just how badly it is done.  Or that it starts out right
but then it is left incomplete.