Comment by nyrikki
13 days ago
Quite incorrect, even smaller colleges like in Greeley Colorado had Symbolics machines and there are threads of Expert Systems all throughout the industry.
The industry as a whole was smaller though.
The word sense disambiguation problem did kill a lot of it pretty quickly though.
Threads, yes. We had one Symbolics 3600, the infamous refrigerator-sized personal computer, at the aerospace company. But it wasn't worth the trouble. Real work was done with Franz LISP on a VAX and then on Sun workstations.
There were a lot of places that tried a bit of '80s "AI", but didn't accomplish much.
2/3 of the fortune 100 companies used Expert Systems in their daily operations and knowledge bases survived.
I don't know how that can be dismissed as nothing.
And they still do, except now they're called "business rules" and they are ad-hoc, buggy versions of an expert system.