McColloch and Pitts and are generally credited with the theoretical foundations of artificial neurons in the 40s, and around that time Hebb was doing some pioneering work on activation potentials, but traces of the idea can be found as far back as James's Principles of Psychology.
The primary paper by McColloch and Pitts is "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943) it doesn't use exactly the term "neural net" but it mentions nets, networks, and "nervous nets". But it seems like the term "nervous net" goes back to the 19th century as a description of primitive neural arrangements in biology.
I remember adapting backpropagation network code from German C't magazine to HiSoft Pascal on ZX Spectrum. Only a few bits worth of inputs, but watching it run and converge was fascinating.
The 80s saw the creation of the neocognitron, self organized maps and the first recurrent neural networks (e.g: hopfield networks, boltzmann machines).
It also saw the first application of backpropagation to neural networks.
Had this actually been published in a Commodore magazine it would have changed my life - revealed a whole new area of computer science to the teenaged me, fifteen years before I actually encountered it. Damn.
Which means that quite possibly papers are coming out this very second with concepts you will treasure years in the future unless you take quick action. You need to start reading the professional literature more, Glen!
People did some pretty cool things with the C64. Back when I was in college (88-91), two professors in the Math department built an interface that hooked up 4 C64 computers so they could run parallel stuff. I guess it was the cheapest solution to the problem.
You and matt_the_bass are right. They had 4 on hand and wanted to explore parallelism. I think they tried to buy some transputer boards first without success then figured they could afford the parts to build the interface. I’m told it was pretty fun to program.
> If you walk up to a computer and ask it “what is the name of the famous bridge in the same state as Disneyland” you won't have much success, but most people will immediately answer, “The Golden Gate Bridge”.
The golden gate bridge is the third result here, with the same link. Seems like you can't rely on google search results to be the same from country to country and person to person.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZis-EoFUya0lMH5oOq...