Same era, different bet

Before we go further, it's worth placing this on the map.

The year is 1957. The Dartmouth researchers are still riding high.
Meanwhile, Frank Rosenblatt is working in the same moment, placing a completely different bet.

The mainstream believed intelligence meant rules. Build the right rules, chain them together, and thinking follows. Rosenblatt looked at that program and thought: that's not how the brain works at all. The brain doesn't follow rules. It learns. Maybe the machine should too.

He wasn't an outsider shouting from the margins. He was inside the same field, at the same moment, just pulling in a completely different direction. The two camps barely talked. They would stay that way for decades.

To understand what Rosenblatt built, we need to go back to the neuron model that gave him the idea.