#AI History

How the field that had been humbled by the first winter found a commercially viable path forward through the expert systems approach — going narrow, going deep, and going to work. The full story of AI's first commercial era, from DENDRAL and MYCIN to XCON and the billion-dollar industry that grew around knowledge engineering, and what it revealed about the nature of expertise itself.

The full narrative of Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Project — the announcement that alarmed the world, the decade of work inside ICOT, the scientific contributions that were real, and the quiet failure that nobody wanted to acknowledge. The most audacious national AI programme in history, and what it revealed about the relationship between industrial policy, scientific vision, and the unpredictability of technological progress.

How MYCIN, XCON, and thousands of corporate AI systems made real money by going narrow — and how the field that had been humbled by the first AI winter found a commercially viable path forward. The rise of expert systems: AI's first commercial era, and the seeds of its second collapse that were planted in its very success.

In 1982, Japan announced the most audacious AI project in history: a ten-year programme to build a new generation of computers based on artificial intelligence. The announcement triggered global panic. The United States and Britain launched emergency responses. And then, quietly, over the next decade, the project failed. How national ambition, geopolitical anxiety, and genuine scientific vision combined to produce one of the great misadventures of the technology era.