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Here's my take on the near-term 'history' of contemporary technology.
Recently, there have only been a handful of major advances:
Imo the main impact of some of these hasn't yet been felt, or is just beginning to be felt:
A note on "concurrency, and scalable, reliable distributed systems". There are a bunch of separate technologies in there but they are related. What has the software industry been working on over the past decade? It seems kinda quiet there -- from the outside it appears that they are just churning out simple (simple in terms of software) social media applications rather than making big technological advances such as we saw with the internet and as we are seeing now with Ethereum. Actually, they HAVE been working on a big, difficult technology: learning how to make software programs that run on many servers at once, providing (a) the ability to serve more users than any single server can support, and (b) reliability when the hardware on one server breaks (or the power goes out, etc). This problem has many facets: (i) how do the servers cooperate in processing information? (ii) how do the servers detect when one of them is having trouble, and step in to take over from it? (iii) when you have to manage 1000 servers instead of 1 server, simple rote systems administration tasks take too much of your time, so you have to automate things that you previously did manually (iv) as user traffic goes up and down, you'd like to turn on and off servers to match, which means again automating something that used to be manual (server setup) (v) in many cases you'd prefer to outsource the actual management of the physical servers to a company specializing in this ("cloud computing").
(and as for the future, what's up next, imo? I'm sure there will be a lot i don't expect, but i have 3 predictions: (1) governance and collaborative cognition, eg more formalized use of computers for collaborative decision-making in projects and institutions, also other collaborative cognition things like augmented debate, predictions markets, fact databases (2) 'new economy' stuff like software-heavy co-ops, open companies, reputation systems (3) the things above whose impact i claim hasn't yet been fully felt will continue to advance; eg wikis, Ethereum
and one larger prediction: w/r/t tech singularities, we seem so far to be in the futurist scenario 'golden age' (the symptoms of which do not preclude an upcoming tech singularity). Namely, information overload caused by the exponential explosion of knowledge and the failure of biological intelligence to increase quickly enough to even survey it causes a growing amount of lag time between the discovery of new knowledge or even new technology, and its effective utilization in most of the places where it is applicable/beneficial/profitable/where it will eventually be utilized. Consequences include: humanity accumulates more and more 'potential energy' in the form of new technology that hasn't yet been applied; strong bias towards long-term economic growth caused by this; technooptimism is often correct (except where it is wrong for political, not technological, reasons); history is very unpredictable due to frequent introductions of new tech; personal investment into learning diverse technical fields is a good strategy; personal investment into learning about underappreciated prior discoveries is more profitable than attempting to make new discoveries; opportunities for systemization of knowledge; technologies for dealing with information overload are extremely useful.
)
Some minor techs recently that were important:
