I still clearly remember the first time I sat in front of an old, hummed-to-life monochrome terminal running an early rule-based decision program. It was back when green-screen CRT monitors dominated computer desks, and computing power was measured in mere megabytes. Watching a screen prompt me with targeted questions about technical troubleshooting, weighing my answers, and then confidently issuing a diagnosis felt like witnessing black magic. For someone used to basic calculators and rigid procedural scripts, interacting with a system that seemed to mimic human reasoning was an unforgettable milestone. That quiet moment in the lab was my personal window into one of the most transformative eras in artificial intelligence history: the birth and rise of Expert Systems. Long before deep neural networks, transformer models, and massive cloud clusters took over the conversation, computer scientists sought a completely different path toward building intelligent machines. In the ...