Tim Bray – whom I respect as much as any tech blogger out there – writes about how we are at multiple inflection points tech-wise today.

Read the whole thing; check out the comments, as well.

What’s somewhat hard to understand – especially for younger techies (I’m nearing 50) – is that all this programming/networking/computer stuff is really really young.

The Web – depending on what event you pick to commemorate the birth – is only 10-15 years old. The personal computer – as we know it today – about twice that old. And today’s iPhone can pretty much kick the ass of any computer built before 1960 or so.

The Industrial Revolution began almost 200 years ago; the computing revolution pretty much began during World War II, and it really didn’t come out of the lab until the 1970s.

I think Tim is right – a lot of things are up for grabs right now; a lot of work is going on making what we now consider normal in one category (programming languages, networking and so on) to be considerably different tomorrow. It may not even resemble what we are currently familiar with. Consider how GUIs displaced command-line interfaces and cloud computing – long the fear of Microsoft and led to the infamous Browser Wars – is now becoming a reality. (And people wonder what MS sees in Yahoo…it’s the cloud, stupid.)