Comment by UncleOxidant

Definitely should be teaching more history. I recall that neural nets were pretty popular in the late 80s into the mid 90s. I recall a local startup that was working on a specialized neural net chip back in the early 90s, but they couldn't keep up with performance/price improvements from Intel & AMD and folded after a few years. Now there must be dozens of companies doing specialized architectures for neural nets.