I worked on an AI program in the 80s that is perhaps the only program from that era that's still being used. I got hired in 1984 into the AI group at Boeing Co

I worked on an AI program in the 80s that is perhaps the only program from that era that's still being used. I got hired in 1984 into the AI group at Boeing Computer Services (neither the AI group nor BCS exists any more, and yes, it was part of that Boeing); I was in the Natural Language Processing group (the expert systems group was a different set of people). I left in 1987 to do s.t. else. By that time, we had built a syntactic parser of English that covered most everything in "standard" English (but without most of the probabilistic apparatus that modern parsers have). It was a solution in search of a problem. After I left, the rest of the NLP team came up with the problem. When Boeing builds an aircraft, they have hundreds, if not thousands, of manuals. (No comment on the 737 MAX...) The planes are sold to airlines around the world, many of whose employees don't understand English anywhere near as well as a native speaker would. Boeing wanted its writers of manuals to write in simplified English. There was (and is) a standard for that, but it was very hard to ensure that writers conformed to it. The solution was to rip out all the "interesting" constructions from my grammar, and retain only the constructions and lexicon that conformed to the simplified (technical) English standard. Then the manuals got pushed through the parser; anything that didn't parse had to be re-written to conform to the grammar. And (I think, remember this was after I left) if anything parsed too ambiguously, it was sent for a rewrite as well. And that's how a 1980s AI program is still in use today.