I got exposed to programming neural networks in the early 90s. It solved certain problems incredibly fast like the traveling salesman problem. I was tinkering with 3D graphics and fractals and map pathfinding. Though it didn’t occur to me how much more power was there.

“Data” was so much smaller then. I had a minuscule hard drive if any, no internet, 8 bit graphics but nothing photo realistic, glimpses of windows and os2, and barely a mouse. In retrospect, it was like embedded programming.