Evem though the mansfield amendment and the lighthill report caused difficulties for basic AI research during the 1970s, the promise of important applications sustained overall funding levels from both government and industry. Excitement, especially about expert systems, reached a peak during the mid-1980s.

I think of the decade of roughly 1975–1985 as “boomtimes” for AI. Even though the boom was followed by a period of retrenchment, its accomplishments were many and important. It saw the founding in 1980 of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI – now called the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), with annual conferences, workshops, and symposia. (Figure 21.1 shows a scene from one of the many trade shows during this era.) Several other national and regional AI organizations were also formed. The Arpanet, which had its beginnings at a few research sites in the late 1960s, gradually evolved into the Internet, linking computers worldwide.

Various versions of the LISP programming language coalesced into INTERLISP, which continued as the predominant language for both AI research and applications (although PROLOG was a popular competitor in Europe, Canada, and Japan). Researchers and students at MIT designed work-station-style computers, called Lisp machines, that ran LISP programs efficiently. Lisp Machines, Inc., and Symbolics were two companies that built and sold these machines. They enjoyed initial success but gradually lost out to other providers of workstations.

Many other AI companies joined the expert systems companies and the Lisp machine companies. For example, in 1978 Earl Sacerdoti andCharles Rosen founded Machine Intelligence Company to market robot vision systems.