> Of course, /the/ canonical logic programming language is Prolog.
> Apparently when people first saw that thing back in the 1970s, everybody
> suddenly thought that human-level AI was just around the corner.
>

When I first started working int hte mid 90s, there was an "AI Lab" in a 
corner of our building.  It had gotten its name in the 80s, but all it 
really was was an office full of decrepit spare parts for some Motorola 
68000-based system running Prolog and Lisp that was keeping track of 
ground crews at an airport.  Texas Instrument had build this system and 
was trying to market it to airlines who have very complex resource 
planning issues.  Only four airlines had bought the system, so TI 
scrapped it.  Qantas hired all the developpers from TI, Iberia got rid 
of its machines, which were all bought by SwissAir, which left Air 
Canada stuck trying to fix 15 year old hardware to run an airline. 
There's a story of one of our network operators getting on aplane with a 
boot diskette, handing it to the local tehc, and hoping back on the 
return flight, just to restart one of the machines in another city.

Thankfully, Y2K finally forced them to switch to some other (also 
prolog-based) software, but running on less esoteric hardware.

Yeah, I know.  Cool story bro.


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