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The Expert Systems Era

  1. 01The Expert Systems Era
  2. 02Rules as intelligence
  3. 03MYCIN and the diagnosis machine
  4. 04The expert systems boom
  5. 05The brittleness problem
  6. 06The maintenance burden
  7. 07The LISP machine collapse
  8. 08A quieter failure
  9. 09Reinforce your understanding
  10. 10Question: expert systems
  11. 11Question: brittleness
  12. 12Question: Maintenance
  13. 13Quiz: answer
  14. 14Rules have limits
  15. 15Want to go deeper?
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The LISP machine collapse

The hardware side collapsed suddenly.

Those had been expensive to buy and expensive to run. By 1987 there were companies building nothing else, selling millions of dollars' worth of equipment every year. Then cheaper, general-purpose computers caught up. Ordinary could do the same work for a fraction of the price.

The market for AI-specific hardware evaporated almost overnight. Companies that had staked everything on it went bankrupt within a few years. The industry that had felt inevitable in 1985 was mostly gone by 1990.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. computerhistory.org
  2. 2. cambridge.org