Systems Approach Full disclosure: I have a history with AI, having flirted with it in the 1980s (remember expert systems?) and then safely avoided the AI winter of the late 1980s by transitioning to formal verification before finally landing on networks as my specialty in 1988.

And just as my Systems Approach colleague Larry Peterson has classics like the Pascal manual on his bookshelf, I still have a couple of eighties AI books on mine, notably PH Winston's Artificial Intelligence (1984). Flipping through that book is pretty fun, in the sense that much of it looks like it could have been written yesterday. For example, the preface begins like this:

The field of artificial intelligence has changed enormously since the first edition of this book was published. Artificial intelligence topics are de rigueur for undergraduate computer science courses, and stories about artificial intelligence appear regularly in most of the reputable news magazines. Part of the reason for the change is that solid results have been accumulated.

I was also interested to see some examples from 1984 of "what computers can do." One example was solving seriously difficult calculus problems—remarkable because accurate arithmetic seems to be beyond the capabilities of today's LLM-based systems.