A few years ago, while clearing out an old archive room at a university engineering department, I stumbled upon a dusty, heavy metallic box labeled "LISP Terminal - 1984." Next to it lay stacks of faded dot-matrix paper printouts covered in carefully nested parenthesis and logical commands. There was no network port on the machine, no Wi-Fi card, and not a single connection to an external database. Yet, according to the handwritten logbook beside it, this exact terminal had spent the mid-1980s serving as an intelligent diagnostic assistant for local medical technicians. That discovery stopped me in my tracks. Today, we instinctively treat artificial intelligence as a child of the internet. We assume that algorithms require vast web-scraping pipelines, cloud server farms, and real-time streaming data to think. But holding those yellowed printouts reminded me of a forgotten truth: artificial intelligence didn't start with the World Wide Web. Long before the first ...