What has been the most exciting decade for tech?

Jon Bentley ponders which of the last few decades has seen the biggest leaps and bounds in life-improving gadgetry.

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A young man asked me recently what it was like being a tech enthusiast in the 1990s. In his early twenties, he was clearly far too young to have experienced the decade directly, but he gushed with excited awe about how enthralling it must have been to witness developments like the World Wide Web, mobile messaging, online commerce and portable computing for the first time. I immediately started pondering which tech decade really was the best in which to be alive, and whether the 1990s deserves the accolade.