What programming technique not done by you, was ahead of its time?

Question

There are developers who understand a technology and produce a solution months or years ahead of its time.

I worked with a guy who designed an system using C# beta which would monitor different system components on several servers. He used SQL Server that would pick up these system monitoring components (via reflection) and would instantiate them via an NT Service.

The simplicity in this design, was that another developer (me), who understood part of a system, would produce a component that could monitor it, as he had the specialized knowledge of that part of the system. I would derive from the monitor base class (to start, stop and log info), install on the monitoring server GAC and then add an entry to the components table in sql server. Then the main engine would pick up this component and do its magic.

I understood parts of it, but couldn't work out by derive from a base class, why add to the GAC etc. This was 6 years ago and it took me months to realize what he achieved.

What programming technique not done by you was ahead of its time?

EDIT : Techniques that you have seen at work or journals/blogs - I don't mean historically over years.

Answer 1

Douglas Engelbart's invention of the GUI (his system had a mouse and text hyperlinks) at the Stanford Research Institute. This was a precursor of the work at Xerox parc.

Anything done by Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, or Ada Lovelace, fits in this category as well.

Answer 2

Let's not forget Edsger Dijkstra, Grace Hopper, Niklaus Wirth, Dennis Ritchie, ... the list can go on and on.

Answer 3

Konrad Zuse built what amounts to the first real computer, complete with floating point, back in 1941.

Answer 4

most things done by Babbage.