There weren't many, but there was a strong contingent of neural network researchers going strong since the time I was in high school in the early 80s. Jerome Fe

There weren't many, but there was a strong contingent of neural network researchers going strong since the time I was in high school in the early 80s. Jerome Feldman (University of Rochester) was a neighbor. James McClelland (Department of Psychology) was a mentor of mine in the mid-80s. This field was far from ignored. We used different names (connectionism, backpropagation) and most importantly we had computers that were tens of thousands of times less capable than what is available today.