Comment by nyrikki
7 months 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.