Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

The 1980s AI "boom" was tiny.

In the 1980s, AI was a few people at Stanford, a few people at CMU, a few people at MIT, and a scattering of people elsewhere. There were maybe a half dozen startups and none of them got very big.

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.