They've set free the coolest technology from behind the locked lab doors at IBM, Xerox and the telephone companies and aft of the machine-gun-equipped guards at America's defense contractors, all of whom had reasons of their own--perfectly valid at the time--to keep the cool stuff from seeing the light of day.
It would be another bit of sweet vindication for Xerox PARC, which was maligned for years as the lab that invented great stuff--the computer mouse, the point-and-click interface, Ethernet networking--but did little to let Xerox shareholders cash in on it.