I often feel bad for the computer scientists of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and to some extent even the 80s. It is often complained that we've done nothing but rehash the ideas of that era over and over, but that's because they were just as smart as us, except they were stuck with calculators instead of computers. Perhaps even more focused since they lacked the distractions of the internet and such. :) They had just as clear a shot at the ideas as we do, except they lack the ability to just whip up a quick prototype in a execution time/programming time tradeoff language like Python or Ruby and try it out in a couple of hours, or run their new idea for a couple trillion cycles on their personal laptop, or what ever. Their every implementation move was a laborious task.
Oh, I'm sure my grandkids will be all like "How did you get work done with mere gigabytes and gigahertz or those terrible, terrible early-2000 languages?" but at least we can do something. Some fields of comp sci are still choked for computational power but at there are some now that aren't, and even the ones that can soak up arbitrary amounts of processing power like evolutionary computation still have some room for conventional improvement first.
We are, slowly, getting over that era; look for any discipline that requires too much power to be implemented at all back then and you can find it. Real-time robotics, computer vision, massive databases and the searching thereof, etc. But we'll still be in their shadow for a while longer.
Oh, I'm sure my grandkids will be all like "How did you get work done with mere gigabytes and gigahertz or those terrible, terrible early-2000 languages?" but at least we can do something. Some fields of comp sci are still choked for computational power but at there are some now that aren't, and even the ones that can soak up arbitrary amounts of processing power like evolutionary computation still have some room for conventional improvement first.
We are, slowly, getting over that era; look for any discipline that requires too much power to be implemented at all back then and you can find it. Real-time robotics, computer vision, massive databases and the searching thereof, etc. But we'll still be in their shadow for a while longer.