Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I see the choice of years as another effort to put the 1960s on a pedestal. If I was being even more cynical, it wouldn't surprise me if the article was written by a Baby Boomer.

You could pick any era in the 20th century and find multiple examples of world changing innovation, and there were other periods of rapid change further back in our past as well (the Industrial Revolution springs to mind).