The most common thing in science is that once some new kind of technology is available, the obvious discoveries get made within about five years, sometimes ten. And that's certainly what's happened in areas like particle physics and planetary science, as well as quite a bit of biology. One pretty good example of this is the telescope. People had been making lenses and even wearing glasses for hundreds of years before there were telescopes. But neither he nor anyone else seriously imagined that one could make a telescope, so it took nearly another hundred years for anyone to think of putting two lenses together and making a telescope.
Computers are another example, in some ways even more egregious.
It's kind of the next step from the idea that's portrayed early in 2001 of the discovery of tools by Moonwatcher the Ape. Well, this idea of universal computing was figured out by Alan Turing and other people in the mid-1930s. But there's really nothing about it that wouldn't have allowed it to be figured out certainly in the 1800s, and quite possibly even as far back as the 1600s. Gottfried Leibniz was almost on to it in the late 1600s. And certainly people like Charles Babbage in the mid-1800s, and then Gottlob Frege and Giuseppe Peano in the late 1800s were really close.