I don't have a computer science background and only have a rudimentary knowledge of what CS is all about. However, I wonder, what are the most significant CS advances of the last five years?
To give you an idea of how clueless I am, I couldn't name one of these advances. But, please don't spare me all the gory details.
I'm not looking for an education in CS or a story about the history of CS. As far as this question is concerned only the past five years matter! :-)
One definite example I can think of is quantum computing: it's a completely new field of CS, most of the important research has happened in the last 10 years (then again, some very basic research reaches back to th 70s), and while it's not yet practically significant, it most likely will be.
The problem with answering your question is this: theoretical advances nearly always become significant only in hindsight, once they've resulted in a practical application that changes people's lives (because that's how most people measure significance) - and that's often long after the original theoretical work.
The obvious example would be the internet, which existed for decades in obscurity before the WWW came along. I believe that pretty much all advances of huge practical significance in the last 10 years are based one theoretical work that's much older.
Other kinds of significant advances are solutions to well-known unsolved problems and concepts that change a lot of other theoretical work. I'm not aware of anything like that in the last 10 years either, not at the real scientific level - but I'm not a scientist.
The IEEE Computer Society has several publications targeted at different types of consumers (general, industry practitioners & managers, academia) across many fields in computer science, software development being one of them. There are some free articles here and there, but with a subscription, you'll be up to speed with all the latest advances (and historical achievements) in CS... the digital archive goes back for decades!
First, I would vote for the rise of the Agile movement and TDD in particular. It isn't a technical development so much as a codification of processes. However, given that the history of software development has been riddled with failures of formalization (Waterfall method, anyone?) and that Agile and its spin-offs appear to be the first successful process discipline in our field, I'd vote for it first.
Second, as a former ISAPI dll developer (a low-level tech for creating web applications) I think that we sometimes underestimate the importance of web development frameworks (everything from JQuery to ASP.NET). Where once web development was constrained by the limitations of building CGI apps and ISAPI dlls, we now have far more productive ways to create web applications. This has led to an explosion of quite sophisticated web apps. That story began a bit more than 10 years ago, though.
Five to ten years is a bit difficult in general: several very important technologies came on the scene just over 10 years ago but have taken time to unwind and reach maturity.
Update: Note that when I answered, the time frame was 5-10 years.
Gesture interfaces seem to have evolved rapidly in the last 5 years. While people have been exploring them longer, only recently have we had a successful commercial application: the iPhone and iPod Touch. Microsoft and the research community have also demonstrated some very interesting applications recently. In 20 years, we might look back and think of this as a pretty extraordinary innovation.
CS is to broad by now to give a general answer to your question. So I stick to theoretical CS: The PCP-Theorem. You can read more e.g. here. Note: this is quite involved mathematically.
I would include the massive importance that social networking sites now have in people's lives. Even 5 years ago, while they existed, I'm not sure many people realized how necessary Facebook and Twitter were going to become. More social science than computer science possibly .... this is my first post so forgive me if I've made some massive blunder ;)