The situation did not improve substantially for decades, and disheartened waves of robotics devotees. But things are changing. Robot tasks wildly impossible in the 1970s and 1980s are nearing commercial viability in the 1990s. Experimental mobile robots map and navigate unfamiliar office suites, and robot vehicles drive themselves, mostly unaided, across entire countries. Computer vision systems locate textured objects and track and analyze faces in real time.
Personal computers recognize text and speech.
This is odd because the cost-effectiveness of computing rose steadily all those decades. In the early 1960s AI programs ran on the era's supercomputers, similar to those used for physical simulations by weapons physicists and meteorologists. By the 1970s the promise of AI had faded, and the effort limped for a decade on old hardware. In contrast, weapons labs upgraded repeatedly to new supercomputers. In the 1980s, departmental computers gave way to smaller project computers then to individual workstations and personal computers.