I mean widely useful things, maybe not very obvious things, that no one has thought of yet or that are rotting in obscurity. If Codd hadn't basically invented r

I mean widely useful things, maybe not very obvious things, that no one has thought of yet or that are rotting in obscurity. If Codd hadn't basically invented relational databases, would we even know what we're missing? For example: Rust took a bunch of ideas from some research languages that one guy did 1-3 decades ago at the time. These ideas have probably always been good and useful, but they weren't put to use, not all of them at least.