[pbadams]

> Let's put deep learning aside for a second. Can anyone here name a single academic in any other subfield of computer science who had a string of groundbreaking research works where every one of those works is from 1980 or after?

Shafi Goldwasser (Probabilistic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.) got her PhD in 1984.

Leslie Lamport is just a bit before your deadline, his 'Time, Clocks' paper came out in 1978, but the bulk of his work was after 1980, including paxos.

While there's definitely some truth to your Kuhnian view of 'times of revolution' in a field, I think it's hard to apply that to recent progress because it may just be that it's not clear which research works were groundbreaking without the benefit of hindsight. To me, the revolutionary period of CS research is still ongoing.

[pclmulqdq]

Almost every breakthrough in distributed systems is more recent. LZW is 1980s. Most data storage systems used today had their guts invented in the last 40 years, with only the top layer being older than that.

If you look at "Computer science" as the narrowly-defined field of data structure and algorithm design in a vacuum, maybe things slowed down after 1980, but that's because problems with different constraints just became more interesting.