In ~1987, I had an AI professor who described the Fifth-Generation Computing Project as starting from a plan written by two researchers. One wrote "We need to do speech recognition, natural language understanding, X, Y, Z, etc." The other followed that up with "So, we will build a Prolog machine."
This was shortly after the demise of Lisp machines, which our CS department had a fair stack of. The gist of the discussion was that a) language doesn't matter that much, and b) this was yet another example of special-purpose hardware being unable to keep with general-purpose hardware.
This was also the professor who gave a talk at the computer science department of Texas A&M and came back saying, "that's not a real school." :-)
This was shortly after the demise of Lisp machines, which our CS department had a fair stack of. The gist of the discussion was that a) language doesn't matter that much, and b) this was yet another example of special-purpose hardware being unable to keep with general-purpose hardware.
This was also the professor who gave a talk at the computer science department of Texas A&M and came back saying, "that's not a real school." :-)