WISARD: a neural network made of memory chips
Igor Aleksander, Thomas Stonham and Bruce Wilkie at Brunel University built WISARD, a pattern recogniser whose neurons were 32,000 random access memory chips in a single-layer net. By Aleksander in 1983 the machine took 5-10 decisions a second on 512 x 512 pixel images; by March 1984 it had been turned into an industrial product.
Why it matters
When neural networks in recognition had, in Aleksander's own words, suffered a quasi-death after 1969, WISARD showed another road: the neuron became an ordinary mass-produced random access memory chip addressed by a group of pixels, rather than a weighted sum of inputs as in the perceptron. Learning got cheap mass-produced hardware, and the network became a commercial instrument.
The patent of Aleksander, Stonham and Wilkie (priority 27 November 1981, US Patent 4,490,847 of 25 December 1984) describes groups of frame-store locations, N-tuples, mapped to discriminator stores, one per class of pattern; a television camera image is digitised into the frame store. Among envisaged uses the patent names terminals that recognise credit cards, bank notes, or people's faces or voices. By the abstract of the 1984 Sensor Review article, Computer Recognition Systems made the system an industrial product under licence from the British Technology Group. A 1987 paper speaks of networks with over a hundred thousand functions of eight inputs each, and uses both the original Brunel WISARD and the later commercial CRS WISARD. What the record does not claim: that WISARD recognised faces in real time, or at what speed; the documents read name faces only among its uses, and the text of the 1984 article and the figures of Stonham's 1986 paper on faces were not read.