How about the very concept of having paradigms of programming (not the specific paradigms like OO or functional, but the idea that you can create a little Turing complete utopia and live inside that utopia never coming out, and, crazily, it actually works in multiple parallel universes of separate paradigms!)
Data structures. Including Codd Normal form or maybe Codd is important enough to mention. Sort of a very large scale GIGO. Or maybe the more important aspect of data structures or structured data or Codd is GIGO itself as a debugging concept.
The idea of the importance of the algorithm, that its not merely an mathematical amusement that there are different ways to calculate something, but now its of critical financial importance how efficient an algo is in time or space or power ... or patents.
Binary. What stopped man from flying until last century was millennia of trying to copy birds and the assumption that failure implied inaccurate copying of birds. What stopped man from computing in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s was a fierce dedication to building computation hardware out of decimal. Once we gave up on birds and decimal, like a decade later we're flying and computing like crazy. Henry Ford didn't build a mechanical oil burning robotic horse, cool as that would have been, he built a better horse by building a horseless carriage that revolutionized the world for better or worse. Sometimes the most important breakthru is deciding what to give up on.
Virtual memory was kinda influential. So.. adders and lookups are so fast and the advantages are so huge that its worth sticking a MMU in the way of address lines... would not have guessed from first principles...
Automata theory is kinda important as a theory of computation, like "can you even do it".
Imaginary property or intellectual property or whatever you want to call it. The concept of legally owning an integer. The concept of owning a piece of media but not the license to apply whats stored on it. Business method patents along the lines of "... on the internet". Patented data formats that are separate from the copyright of the data stored in the patented form. Copyleft. FOSS. GPL and its less free competitors BSD and others. Domain squatting. Blockchain financial instruments, or properties or currencies or whatever they are. For better or worse imaginary property has driven a lot of "innovation" and "economic activity", some of it even useful.
These are all important things but either fall under one of the broad categories or isn't a software innovation:
Paradigms of programming, data structures, importance of the algorithm : Falls under programming although I'm not sure why GC wouldn't fall under that as well.
Codd : programming (data structures) and transactions. He explicitly references databases in the transaction section.
Binary: A hardware innovation.
Virtual memory: Falls under OS.
Automata: Falls under hardware or programming and possibly sculpture?
IP: Falls under copyright / patent law.
An aside: I've always known GIGO to stand for Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Data structures. Including Codd Normal form or maybe Codd is important enough to mention. Sort of a very large scale GIGO. Or maybe the more important aspect of data structures or structured data or Codd is GIGO itself as a debugging concept.
The idea of the importance of the algorithm, that its not merely an mathematical amusement that there are different ways to calculate something, but now its of critical financial importance how efficient an algo is in time or space or power ... or patents.
Binary. What stopped man from flying until last century was millennia of trying to copy birds and the assumption that failure implied inaccurate copying of birds. What stopped man from computing in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s was a fierce dedication to building computation hardware out of decimal. Once we gave up on birds and decimal, like a decade later we're flying and computing like crazy. Henry Ford didn't build a mechanical oil burning robotic horse, cool as that would have been, he built a better horse by building a horseless carriage that revolutionized the world for better or worse. Sometimes the most important breakthru is deciding what to give up on.
Virtual memory was kinda influential. So.. adders and lookups are so fast and the advantages are so huge that its worth sticking a MMU in the way of address lines... would not have guessed from first principles...
Automata theory is kinda important as a theory of computation, like "can you even do it".
Imaginary property or intellectual property or whatever you want to call it. The concept of legally owning an integer. The concept of owning a piece of media but not the license to apply whats stored on it. Business method patents along the lines of "... on the internet". Patented data formats that are separate from the copyright of the data stored in the patented form. Copyleft. FOSS. GPL and its less free competitors BSD and others. Domain squatting. Blockchain financial instruments, or properties or currencies or whatever they are. For better or worse imaginary property has driven a lot of "innovation" and "economic activity", some of it even useful.