Personal computers and cell phones.  And the "inventors" had to press on for a long time.  And continue to press on, still not satisified that their visions have been achieved.   It's about software and functions, not hardware and platforms.

Alan Kay: "Twenty years ago at PARC, I thought we would be way beyond where we are now. I was dissatisfied with what we did there. The irony is that today it looks pretty good. The result of our work is techniques for doing software in an interesting and more powerful way. That was back in the seventies. People today aren't doing a lot of work to move programming to its next phase."

Martin Cooper: "I call them the error interface wars. I think a huge amount of money has been wasted in this area. And the thing I think about most is, who cares? What people really care about are the kinds of services they get and how it's going to affect them.... We should not be talking about CDMA and TDMA and i-mode, we should be talking about voice service, Internet access, downloading music, taking pictures, making people's lives safer, making people's lives more comfortable and more convenient. The telecommunications industry has gotten into a technological mode that has retarded its development."