Most of these are from the late 70s&#x2F;early 80s, so not quite half a century.<p>Debugging – look at Smalltalk if you don&#x27;t believe me.<p>Security – Intel i432 didn&#x27;t sell well, but now we&#x27;re sure wishing it had. The entire system was built on an object-capability model from the hardware up. The OS and userspace were fully written in Ada.<p>Persistence – System&#x2F;38 and AS&#x2F;400 — <i>everything</i> has a persistent address. All pointers are 128-bit (yes... this was designed in the late 70s). Everything is an object and the OS has a built-in database. You can persist anything effortlessly.<p>String processing – Regular expressions are useful; SNOBOL is more readable, more powerful, more efficient, and existed in 1962. Awk is a joke.<p>Declarative programming – I feel like Greenspun&#x27;s 10th Rule applies at least as much to Prolog as it does to Lisp. The sheer number of cases where embedding a little unification engine dramatically simplifies code is pretty baffling.<p>GUIs – we&#x27;ve almost caught up to the ease of use of the Dynamic Windows system on Symbolics Lisp machines.<p>Concurrency – it amuses me that Go gets so much attention lately when it&#x27;s just a re-skin of Occam from 1983.<p>Probably more. I feel like i432 and AS&#x2F;400 in particular were very, very ahead of their time.