[ih] History of AI and Internet

[william yeager]

> On Jun 22, 2026, at 7:54 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> but expert systems were not real AI

Rubbish ! (Steven Hawking’s favorite denial). They WERE real AI at the time they existed. I worked in the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab at Stanford as well as for the DENDRAL project - AI in chemistry. My area of interest was using organic chemistry along with signal processing to analyze GCMS data with peak analysis gradients to detect inherited rare diseases in children from the fractions of these children’s blood. It worked and these were not heuristics. The spectra that were produced were give to several Phd’s in chemistry to identify the compounds, they were stored in a library for future recognition. Is it AI now? No. Was it then. Yes. What we did was state-of-the-art AI between 1970 and 1990 or so. 

Ed Feigenbaum who is a good friend received the Turing Prize along with Raj Redy for their work on expert systems in 1994.

I am currently writing a history of AI from 1955 to the present from the perspective that it was a Gestalt. Have looked into what was AI for each of the multiple versions over the years. I’ve been in computer science and math for 60 years, lived through these, epochs, and believe me there were battles noted in the press initiated by antagonists who were worried that expert systems were going to replace the experts.

AI evolved over the years to where we are now and definitely NOT as a SILO.

Bill

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