I think the most interesting thing is that it took 15 years for people to apparently take this seriously. And another 40 to recognize its impact. The original paper[1] was from 1982...
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf
I think part of the difference is that in software we can often try the new thing immediately and see whether it helps. In biology, "this is real" and "this is important" are much harder to establish because the system is noisy, the experiments are slow and the implications may not be obvious until other pieces of the puzzle show up
It used to be slower in software development as well. The internet and the exponentially increasing number of software developers accelerated it. And of course new hardware that made things practical that were only a theoretical possibility before.
A lot of "rapid adoption" in software is really the result of unusually cheap distribution and feedback loops
True, that said, I downloaded and compiled Perl in 1987 from comp.sources.misc, even back then, things moved at light speed compared to health and medical.