Cheshirechappie":3e45xx0d said:
Alan Turing and company produced a very large incremental development with the first programmable confuser during the war years, and the personal computer was the next big increment. After that, it's been more, frequent but smaller increments.
For what it's worth, as I understand it, the credit for Colossus really belongs to Tommy Flowers - although Turing certainly made some rather fundamental contributions to the field of computer science.
The biggest single game-changer in the recent history of computer equipment was almost certainly the invention of the solid-state transistor, which happened over the course of about thirty years and several people but could probably be practically pinpointed at the original electronic transistor from Bell Labs in the late 40s and the production of silicon transistors at Texas Instruments in the 50s. Flowers' vacuum tubes were seriously unreliable and power-hungry in comparison, and without the transistor it's pretty unlikely that computing equipment would have become anywhere near as ubiquitous as it has.
In terms of consumer devices, two things come to mind:
- in a specialist market, the electromagnetic graphics tablet, as primarily brought to market by Wacom. Stylus-based computer input was nothing particularly new, but the EMR version does away with the cable tethering the stylus (and batteries!) and at the same time has given us more detailed metrics like significant degrees of pressure-sensitivity and tilt detection - they more or less blew away all competition in the field and made the production of entirely digital art far more possible.
- generally speaking, capacitative touchscreens, as found on your multi-touch smartphone/tablet/whatever. Prior to capacitative touch, touchscreen devices generally involved tapping the screen really hard with a fingernail or stylus or something to get it to register anything at all, and involved no finesse and a very low degree of control... not to mention squidgy plastic screens which damaged easily. Interfaces were driven by the limitations of the old touchscreens, and capacitative touch has opened up much better interactions. Again: the old was swept away more or less completely, in about a year the previous cutting-edge felt practically antique.
