Nearby, BDD said


and I was reminded of this excellent talk by Bret Victor:
The Future of Programming


(which I've linked before, but it's worth a second viewing, at least.)

I'm pretty sure we could find something similar all about computer architecture: the Atlas supercomputer brought in a number of innovations, as did the successor machine, the KDF-9.

[The Atlas was 100x faster than its predecessors, and the deployment of the first Atlas increased the compute power in the UK by a factor of six.]

OK, so it turns out I meant a different talk entirely:
OSCON 2013: John Graham-Cumming, "Turing's Curse"

Although GUI was said to have originated in 1973 with the development of the Alto computer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the earliest known example of a GUI was Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad CAD program, first seen in 1963. Alto's was the first known instance of combining a mouse with the GUI, and therefore could be considered the first practical application of a general-purpose GUI. Alto's display was pretty crude by current standards, but it worked and thanks to a visit to PARC by Steve Jobs in the late 1970s, GUI would find its way into the mainstream (specifically, the overpriced and under-powered Apple Lisa). The rest, as they say, is history.

As I had said, there is little about computing these days that is new.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

It looks like Sutherland's thesis was published in Jan 1963, so it's highly likely he did a lot of the work in 1962.