There's this classic Quora thread: "What will Silicon Valley do once it runs out of Doug Engelbart's ideas?"

Alan Kay himself chimes in to basically say that Silicon Valley has no novel ideas outside of Englebart's, and that there are still a lot of unplumbed insights that Silicon Valley never understood and discarded prematurely.

There is a vast wealth of game-changingly great ideas from many decades ago that were developed before Silicon Valley's software ecosystem roared to life.

Back then all of the interesting ideas were being developed in research labs, because they were too hard to productionize in the real world.

In the 90's and 2000's, as Silicon Valley's software ecosystem explosively blossomed, it picked over all of these ideas and tried many on for size.

But the hardware was puny compared to today; we were missing things like realtime rendering, and of course LLMs and embeddings.

The industry concluded "this idea is infeasible" to a great many ideas, and everyone just kind of forgot about them, throwing them on the junkheap.

But there are huge numbers of amazing ideas waiting to blossom with the right enabling technology, dotted throughout that junkheap.

Now that there are titans of the software industry in Silicon Valley, the "research lab" kind of exploration of ideas is happening behind closed doors, with the knowhow and results locked up in confidential documents and the minds of those employees.

Which means the junkheap of papers from the past are the prime source of game-changing ideas.