STUDENT
Daniel Bobrow's program read high-school algebra problems written in English, turned them into equations and solved them.
Why it matters
The first working bridge from text to computation: sentences became equations with no person in between.
STUDENT worked by pattern matching rather than grammatical parsing: it looked for familiar constructions and discarded the rest. That produced good results on typical problems and broke on atypical ones. Bobrow described the limits honestly in the thesis; the same gap later became an argument for the field's critics.