The Last 80 Years in EE

Had an interesting chat today with my advisor - he started explaining to me the history of innovation in the field of electrical engineering over the past 80 years or so. I'll try to recap his thoughts, and I hope I get them right:

So the field of EE was basically created in about the 1930s - prior to that, electrical stuff was contained within mechanical engineering, and prior to that, (at the beginning of the 20th century), a lot of the engineering focus was on civil engineering. In the 1930s, as the world got "electrified," power engineering was the main focus. Then, in the 1950s and 60s, semiconductor devices (especially transistors) started to emerge (I think the transistor was invented earlier, but I guess nothing useful was done with it until then).

Each of the next 4 decades had a dominant new innovative trend and can sort of be summarized by the emergence of a couple major companies. The 1970s witnessed the emergence of companies like IBM and AMD, as transistors became more prevalent in computing. The 1980s were the dawn of personal computing - Microsoft is the obvious one to think of here. The 1990s saw the growth of companies such as QUALCOMM and Cisco - wireless technology and networking. And the 2000s, while not over yet, will probably be remembered for Google - computing services.

So the general trend of innovation in EE seems to be toward higher and higher levels of systems - from transistors and hardcore semiconductor physics to personal computers to networks to services. Keep in mind that I'm not saying that any of the older fields, like semiconductor devices, are lacking in new innovation, but as far as the emergence of new fields, that appears to be the general trend. I wonder what the next logical step will be...you could have a lot of impact if you could predict that!