There's lots of other results for 'deep networks' in the search too (sorting by date, they appear quite consistently, many of them don't get many votes though).
I think it went 'mainstream' around 2007, with Hinton's TechTalk at Google http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M And even being pretty far from the ML/AI community at the time, I remember playing with Bengio's GPU based Theano Deep Learning Tutorial at around 2008/09. What had happened right now is just that it had finally started beating SVMs consistently and is fast enough to be used for practical purposes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4779647
There's lots of other results for 'deep networks' in the search too (sorting by date, they appear quite consistently, many of them don't get many votes though).