This is a photo from an IBM magazine article published in 1986 when I was an Artificial Intelligence programmer at IBM’s Artificial Intelligence Technology Center (AITC) in Washington DC. This was during the days when programmers were still required to wear shirts and ties at work (now, programmers come to work in shorts and t-shirts). We used specialized computers and languages to create ‘smart’ systems. Much of this work was primitive by today’s AI standards, but we created the foundation for much of the work that followed. My special interest was in getting computers to understand Human languages and I was proud of the work I did in that field. Unfortunately, the papers I published in those days were classified “IBM Confidential” and were not shared with the outside world, but we presented them at many internal IBM conferences.