Professor's perceptron paved the way for AI – 60 years too soon Cornell Chronicle

In July 1958, the U.S. Office of Naval Research unveiled a remarkable invention. An IBM 704 – a 5-ton computer the size of a room – was fed a series of punch cards. After 50 trials, the computer taught itself to distinguish cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right. It was a demonstration of the "perceptron" – "the first machine which is capable of having an original idea," according to its creator, Frank Rosenblatt '50, Ph.D. '56. At the time, Rosenblatt – who later became an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior in Cornell's Division of Biological Sciences – was a research psychologist and project engineer at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York.