Really? And here I was thinking that my discipline was one of the most rapidly evolving on the planet...

Not so much, mostly people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Consider, there is vary little that separates handheld Apps from desktop applications. Sure, if you come from the Web side of things it seems new and nifty but they are just stand alone applications. Capacitive sensing touch screens where where new in 1965, but wait it's 2012. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

People worry about what happens when desktop CPU's have hundreds of cores, but the super computer world is already dealing with hundreds of thousands of cores etc.

PS: I think this relates to the hacker mentality. If you find a problem you look for a solution rater than see how other people solved the same problem 30 years ago.

Since the 70s, most apps have comprised "forms" (screens for a user to enter something, that will be stored in a database) and "reports" (screen that nicely format the contents of a database). This is all Facebook et al really are...

A loop is a loop. Math doesn't change much either. Nor does the concept of space and time, etc. It seems new and different to young people, but underneath, it's mostly the same as it was 40 years ago.

Nah, go read some of the academic papers from the 70s. We haven't moved very far in software. The hardware shininess obscures that though.

This betrays a stark lack of perspective. What's old is often new again, in different guises.