Edited by author 06-28-2002 10:48 PM
"Depending on your PoV, the innovation took place in Turing's day and stopped, or it
 has been continuous ever since, but the drop off Bruce describes just
 didn't happen."

That's awfully B&W. What's innovation to a CS wonk is a incomprehensible hash of neologisms, strange usages, and white boards full of badly drawn squares and circles to an, um, civilian computer user.

Before I went back to school and got all learned, I trained salespeople and worked trade shows where I dealt with electronic store buyers, reps, press people and the great unwashed. From the point of view of the non-geek, computers got *massively more useful* from the mid-eighties to the late nineties. They went from baffling, high-priced toys that the boss made you learn to indispensible parts of our quotidian realities.

Over the last few years, the apparent rate of innovation from the point of view of average user has slowed down, to the point where people are buying fewer new computers.

Average User includes *me* by the way. I can fully appreciate glitz and glory and technical sweetness, but I see no need to get rid of my current home system (533 MHz AMD K2) or laptop (90 MHz Pentium). I have enough money in my "new hardware" fund to get a real screamer system, but I won't because what I have does everything I need. I don't even have a hankering to participate in the WiFi revolution, because there's no killer app yet, from my POV.