This was just before the second AI winter. It involved neural networks, prolog, lisp, fuzzy logic, Japan overtaking US in AI, etc.

Lots of good work with neural networks was done back then:

   A learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines
   DH Ackley, GE Hinton, TJ Sejnowski - Cognitive science, 1985

   Learning representations by back-propagating errors
   DE Rumelhart, GE Hinton, RJ Williams - nature, 1986

   Phoneme recognition using time-delay neural networks
   A Waibel, T Hanazawa, G Hinton, K Shikano, KJ Lang - Readings
   in speech recognition, 1990