zlacker

>>janvdb+(OP)
> My aunt and cousin thought of computer technology as a series of increasingly elaborate sand castles supplanting one another after each high tide clears the beach.

They are basically right though.

The counterexample of some Unix utilities means nothing. You're not getting a CS degree in order to develop the next version of cat, are you?

We have some things with a long history and they are easy to identify. It is just hindsight being 20/20.

For every one of those things, there are countless that can't be seen or felt. They aren't here; they got washed away.

Who uses the Michigan Terminal System?

Or a web framework from ten years ago?

>>kazina+ev
I am not sure that computer technology would have become powerful, inexpensive, and ubiquitous to the extent that it is become today were his aunt and his cousin correct.

The aunt and the cousin are thinking that 'computer technology' exists at the level of abstraction of the sandcastles in the metaphor. To some extent it does, but the vastly greater part of it is at the level of abstraction of the knowledge and theory of building sand castles, as gained over the course of many iterations.

One of the most common themes one hears, when reading what people write about computer science, is how few new ideas in computer science are actually involved in nearly anything anyone does on a computer (or teaches at the undergraduate level).