In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” [microsoft.com]. Here are his opinions from 1999 on “what worked”.
Yes
Virtual memory
Address spaces
Packet nets
Objects / subtypes
RDB and SQL
Transactions
Bitmaps and GUIs
Web
AlgorithmsMaybe
Parallelism
RISC
Garbage collection
ReuseNo
Capabilities
Fancy type systems
Functional programming
Formal methods
Software engineering
RPC
Distributed computing
SecurityBasically everything that was a Yes in 1999 is still important today.
The article is a current snapshot on those issues [danluu.com]. Do you agree?