I think Applicative was introduced within the last 10 years. The paper that introduced them was published in 2008 (Applicative Programming with Effects, Conor McBride and Ross Paterson)
You've always been able to have type holes at the ghci prompt - wrap your expression in a lambda and see what's inferred as the first argument.
That's not to say the ability to do it in the middle of a program isn't huge - it is! - but just a technique I have occasionally found quite useful that's available to those stuck on older versions of ghc.