How DENDRAL was conceived and born

As agreed with your organizers, this will be a somewhat personal history. They have given me permission to recall how I came to work with Ed Feigenbaum on DENDRAL, an exemplar of expert systems and of modelling problem-solving behavior. My recollections are based on a modest effort of historiography, but not a definitive survey of and search for all relevant documents. On the other hand, they will give more of the flow of ideas and events as they happened than is customary in published papers in scientific journals-- accounts so dry that Medawar lugubriously calls them fraudulent (43); cf. Merton & Zuckerman (44, 45, 61). These authors point out that the standard scientific publication is narrowmindedly devoted to the context of justification. The DENDRAL effort (along with much of medical informatics) is dedicated to discovery: should we use a different standard for its history? I hope it will be eventually possible to divert my colleagues from the more important work they do from day to day, and join me in a larger effort at historical research and informed consensus. My account is inevitably incomplete, especially about what others were thinking at a given moment. Built into the phenomenon of history, as soon as enough time has passed to enable some detachef judgment, the evidence becomes frail, and we become vulnerable to the myths we create. Understanding all of these limitations, I will no longer qualify every remark: it should be implicit that each is "to the best of LAY