My classmate wrote back-propagating neural nets on his Amiga 1200 in 1994.

We had pretty high hopes back then. I and I think many others sort of assumed we would have had General AI by now. Or at least going in that direction. Another classmate said in 1992 that scientists had simulated the neural net equivalent to a worm or something. This topic came up re the neural net featured in the movie Terminator 2.

The current use of "neural nets" are both under- and overwhelming. But definitely over-whelmingly boring, to me. It's good, don't get me wrong. But from my viewpoint, it looks like we have found a trick, and now try to apply this same trick to as many new fields as possible.