I would have been much less intimidated by some of these if, at the time I learned them, I had realized (or had been told!) they were only such recent inventions. I've always been very put down by thinking I was only learning the basic stuff and still had a lot of math to go before being able to do interesting stuff that hadn't been done already. As it turns out, what I learned in signal processing was pretty much state of the art and I could have started to think of new applications right away :/
I had in a way an opposite reaction. I was surprised that the most recent algorithm listed was discovered as long ago as 1987. I didn't notice any date on the paper so I'm assuming it's recent. Judging by the dates, the period of most rapid discovery ended in the mid-sixties, at which point it slowed down and then slowed down much more in the eighties. The overall pattern of slow-down is not terribly surprising (low hanging fruit and all), but that the list ends in 1987 is surprising.
It might also that it takes time for algorithms to find uses and to really make an impact.