>> That period of 1989 to about 1998 represented a near decade of arguably unmatched intellectual explosion and creativity.

It certainly was exciting.

A couple of other explosive periods -
-1964 - 1970 When the IBM 360 brought mainframe computing to companies outside the Fortune 500.

-1970 to 1982 When the DEC PDP-11 and its clones displaced hundreds of mainframes 5 times it size and costing 10 times as much, till that fateful day in 1982 when the IBM PC hit the street.

We're in the midst of a major revolution right now.
In my day we replaced entire data centers with a single windows NT server, a hub and a lot of Ethernet cables.
It's just a matter of time till that all that gear winds up in the Smithsonian.