If you dig enough thru the various papers and such written about ALVIIN, you'll find links to older projects, and a couple of "follow on" ones as well.
One of the earlier projects that (I believe) led to ALVINN was the CMU Terragator - this was a custom 6-wheel chassis about the size of a large quad-cycle that was designed to navigate around the CMU campus. It was basically a testing platform for autonomous vehicle technologies. IIRC, this was around 1984 or so.
After the Terragator, but prior to ALVINN (and ultimately led to the funding for ALVIIN) there was a project to develop a radio-controlled vehicle that could navigate through an unstructured environment (a cluttered alleyway, IIRC) called "DAVE".
These projects and more are all referenced in the NVidia End-to-End CNN paper.
This network is literally 30x32 pixels => two NN layers => steering decisions. No convolution, no semantic segmentation. It's a very cool technical demonstration, but we've come a long way since, on every front.