So, I'd say the Network is a bigger deal than Agriculture. Agriculture was important for humans to settle down, it definitely shouldn't be underestimated just because we take it for granted now, but the Network enables human culture to scale enormously further than it could have otherwise.
In my opinion that Network begins with the Treaty of Bern in 1874, but you could make an argument for the Congress of Vienna near the start of that century if you squint hard enough. The big deal is connecting people, in the case of Bern by enabling everyone to send and receive letters. The latest iteration (an electronic digital network, the Internet) is just a further iterative improvement on that idea.
But Programming is even more fundamental because it's recursively meta-applicable. Improvements in agriculture don't apply to themselves, but improvements in programming do and that's enabled exponential growth in capabilities.
The seed is present in abstract ideas by Turing and others near the start of the 20th century, but the practical application definitely begins with "Amazing" Grace Hopper and her "compiler" (we would not today classify what Grace designed as a "compiler" but that's what she called it). Grace saw that the job of processing programming symbols to turn them into machine code is exactly the sort of symbol manipulation that you can practically program computers to do, and so designed such a program, starting a process that continues to this day and we now all rely upon without thinking about it. When you improve the compiler program, you get a more capable way to write programs, including the compiler program, and so on forever. That's how you get from slaving over a stack of punched cards to Lisp REPL in about a generation.
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So, I'd say the Network is a bigger deal than Agriculture. Agriculture was important for humans to settle down, it definitely shouldn't be underestimated just because we take it for granted now, but the Network enables human culture to scale enormously further than it could have otherwise.
In my opinion that Network begins with the Treaty of Bern in 1874, but you could make an argument for the Congress of Vienna near the start of that century if you squint hard enough. The big deal is connecting people, in the case of Bern by enabling everyone to send and receive letters. The latest iteration (an electronic digital network, the Internet) is just a further iterative improvement on that idea.
But Programming is even more fundamental because it's recursively meta-applicable. Improvements in agriculture don't apply to themselves, but improvements in programming do and that's enabled exponential growth in capabilities.
The seed is present in abstract ideas by Turing and others near the start of the 20th century, but the practical application definitely begins with "Amazing" Grace Hopper and her "compiler" (we would not today classify what Grace designed as a "compiler" but that's what she called it). Grace saw that the job of processing programming symbols to turn them into machine code is exactly the sort of symbol manipulation that you can practically program computers to do, and so designed such a program, starting a process that continues to this day and we now all rely upon without thinking about it. When you improve the compiler program, you get a more capable way to write programs, including the compiler program, and so on forever. That's how you get from slaving over a stack of punched cards to Lisp REPL in about a generation.