A.I. (1981)

"This thing was going one day when a friend of mine named Edward Fredkin, who’s a professor of computer science at M.I.T., came in, and he said, ‘That sounds pretty good. How did you get it to make those sounds?’ I showed him, and we spent the afternoon making more sounds. Fredkin formed a company to manufacture the machines as toys.”"

I believe this is it:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2014/06/meet-strange-wonderful...

"At one point the overhead lights dimmed, the orchestra began playing the theme of the film “Star Wars,” and a spotlight focused on an opening in the stage curtain through which Gammonoid was supposed to propel itself onto the stage. To my dismay the robot got entangled in the curtain and its appearance was delayed for five minutes."

It is a long article but a one well worthy of the time spent reading. It is not a "on my way home" type of read.

I specially enjoyed the last paragraphs where Minsky describes how he envisions A.I. development in the future. That he is not seeking a single unifying theory of human brain, but rather, several smaller theories that in the end will create a complete picture of how human brain functions.

As in this article, there will be lots of whitewashing of the relationship between Minsky and Rosenblatt today, I'm afraid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_(book)

The bulk of this is various biographical anecdotes about Marvin Minsky; perhaps the HN submission title might reflect that?

IMHO this article is terrible.

Aside from the atrocious size it both meanders along on screen-length paragraphs and then jumps between decades, characters, and quotes.

Who the hell can read something like this? Word count and editing matters even if we don't have physical pages to constrain the text anymore.

Sloppy sloppy journalism.