The 1970s

The growing technophobia of sci-fi films of the 1960s becomes full-blown in the films of the 1970s. In these films, the threat of computer technology moves out of the top-secret, cold-war government installations and interstellar spaceships of the 1950s and 1960s and into our everyday lives. Fears about the increasing computerization of the culture reach near hysterical levels in films such as Westworld, The Stepford Wives, Futureworld, Terminal Man, and Demon Seed. In 1977, however, the release of the space opera Star Wars signaled the rebirth of the gleaming, "gee-whiz" cinematic celebrations of technology of the 1950s. C-3P0 and R2D2 have more in common with Robby the Robot, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello than with Alpha60 (Alphaville), HAL-9000 (2001), Colossus (Colossus: The Forbin Project), or Proteus IV (Demon Seed).

Below are some representative films from the 1970s. Clicking on the title will take you to the filmography page, where you'll find a brief description of the film, links to other CyberCinema pages on that film, and a link to that film's entry in the Internet Movie Database.

Silent Running (1971) Solaris (1971) Westworld (1973) Dark Star (1974)
The Stepford Wives (1974) Future World (1974) Terminal Man (1974)  
Demon Seed (1977) Star Wars (1977) Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)  

Some AI Milestones from the 1970s*

1970

  • Floppy diskettes introduced
  • Pople and Myers begin INTERNIST (aid in diagnosis of human diseases)
  • Terry Winograd's SHRDLU (Natural Language Processing, Blocks World)

1971

  • First microprocessor in U.S. (Intel 8008)
  • Silent Running released by MCA; Earth's remaining vegetation cared for by Bruce Dern and cute robots, but no action figures yet available.
  • First pocket calculator (Poketronic)

1972

  • Dreyfus publishes "What Computers Can't Do"
  • Smalltalk developed at Xerox PARC (Kay)
  • Cray Research formed
  • Hewlett Packard introduces HP-35 for $395.
  • Nolan Bushell's PONG -- first video game

1973

  • Lighthill report kills AI funding in UK
  • Schank and Abelson develop scripts
  • First bit-mapped graphics-oriented monitor
  • Westworld released by MGM; Yul Brynner massacres theme park customers, millions cheer him on.

1974

  • First computer-controlled robot
  • Minsky's "A Framework for Representing Knowledge"
  • SUMEX-AIM network established (applications of AI to medicine)
  • John Carpenter's student film Dark Star released; Bomb #20 gets a god-complex.
  • Ahl Publishes "Creative Computing"
  • Stepford Wives released; men replace their wives with androids, but nobody can tell the difference
  • Nelson writes "Computer Lib"
  • Michael Crichton's Terminal Man released; the computer chip inside his head gets switched to overload

1975

  • Cooper & Erlbaum found Nestor to develop neural net technology
  • First issue of BYTE
  • First personal computer Altair 8800 (256 bytes of memory)
  • DARPA launches image understanding funding program
  • Larry Harris founds Artificial Intelligence Corp. (NLP)

1976

  • Adventure (Crowther and Woods) -- first adventure game.
  • Kurzweil introduces reading machine
  • Lenat's AM (Automated Mathematician)
  • Marr's primal sketch as a visual representation
  • Cray-1 supercomputer, 138 megaflops

1977

  • Wozniak and Jobs design and build Apple Computer
  • 3CPO and R2D2 star in Star Wars; action figures widely available
  • Apple II, Radio Shack TRS80, Commodore PET
  • Demon Seed released by MGM; Proteus IV impregnates Julie Christie, who gives birth to a toaster
  • First computer camp for children
  • Microsoft is founded

1979

  • "Pac Man" introduced
  • Star Trek finally makes it to the silver screen; William Shatner overacts even more
  • Compuserve and The Source are founded
  • Steve Jobs visits Xerox PARC
  • Raj Reddy founds Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
  • MYCIN as good as medical experts (Journal of American Medical Assoc.)

*Adapted from Mark Kantrowitz, "Milestones in the Development of Artificial Intelligence."
Click here for full-text version.

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