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Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospect of Artificial Intelligence, Pamela McCorduck, San Francisco, California, Freeman, 1979, 375 pp., ISBN 0-7167-11135-4. McCorduck's Machines Who Think after Twenty-Five Years The frame tale provided therein was basically that AI was "an idea that has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized" (p. The primary principle of selection governing her account is that AI "did not originate in the search for solutions to practical problems…. I like to think of artificial intelligence as the scientific apotheosis of a veritable cultural tradition" (p. However, recent historical research, which includes a reexamination of McCorduck's own interview transcripts, has begun to uncover other possible narratives, es-Book Review It is a tribute to her powers of observation and her conversational style that none has really proven more successful than Pamela McCorduck's Machines Who Think, Currently, it is the first source cited on the AI Topics web site on the history of AI.