In the New York Times there is an article about Jay Harman. It is a good article and I enjoyed it.

But what caught my eye (courtesy of a colleague on a list) were these paragraphs about how long progress takes.

Even in fields such as the computer industry, which celebrates innovation, systemic change can be glacial.

Consider that Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in 1964. It was obvious to many people that it was a better way to control a computer, yet it took two decades even to begin reaching a mass audience. Or consider the hyperlink, invented independently by Mr. Engelbart and the computing evangelist Ted Nelson in the mid-1960s. It took roughly three decades to reach the public in the form of the World Wide Web.

This summer will mark the 40th anniversary of the day when Alan Kay, the father of the modern personal computer, had his “aha” moment. Seeing a plasma display engineered for the Plato educational computing project, he realized that a portable computer with a flat panel display was possible. Yet computers that came close to matching his original “Dynabook” idea — which included a wireless connection to a global digital library — weren’t widely available for another three decades.