It seems like, AI research produced some fantastic results, but those systems were quickly relabeled to not be AI. Like, win at chess.
Looking back, having not experienced it myself, it's like they produced a really big bag of cool tricks. But you're not going to be doing much searching in 640k of ram. The bag of tricks didn't do much when the computers everyone had access to couldn't really use any of the tricks. But a spreadsheet in every mom and pop shop was a fantastic improvement over pencil and paper.
Right, some things came out of it but progress was slow in the more general areas. Still there was progress but hyper had to die, it was time to come back to the planet and do some database-stuff.
What was the limiting factor of the expert system approach? Something like the size of the search space or that the number of rules you’d have to write was just infeasibly large?
AI was a tiny field in those days. Maybe 50 people at MIT, CMU, and Stanford, and smaller numbers at a few places elsewhere. No commercial products that were any good.