Ask HN: What are the great ideas in computing?

[apu]

Alan Kay has said that "the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past...it's very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past."

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Alan-Kay-The-PC-Must-Be-Revamped151Now/

So what are some of the great ideas of computing?

Where/how does one go about finding them? There is so much trash and "pop culture" in the majority of what's been written in our field (both popular and research works), that I don't know how to find the important ideas.

[apu]

I'll start with one way I've been trying to find some of these ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

Yes, awards always have a component of politics in them, but it's useful to look at these for a zero'th order approximation of at least some of the important ideas in our field. I've been working through each laureate's important works to try to find the key ideas. It's slow going, but yielding some good results so far...

[MaysonL]

"Turtles all the way down."

check out vpri.org (Alan Kay's current organization) and Newspeak, the programming language (see Room 101, the blog).

[dmaclay]

Look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos to see how much of what has recently become mainstream dates back to 1968.

[davidmathers]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_...