The Dartmouth workshop names the field

The proposal was two pages long and asked the Rockefeller Foundation for $13,500. Written in August 1955 by John McCarthy, a young Dartmouth mathematician, with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM and Claude Shannon, it opened with a claim the field has been trying to honour ever since: "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." McCarthy picked the name "artificial intelligence" partly to keep the meeting clear of cybernetics and Norbert Wiener.

The workshop ran from 18 June to 17 August 1956. People came and went; there was no agenda and no agreed result. Newell and Simon showed Logic Theorist, the only program that worked. The others talked. But the guest list became the field's leadership: McCarthy went to MIT and then Stanford, Minsky ran the MIT AI Lab, Newell and Simon built Carnegie Mellon's, and among them they trained most of the next generation.

The proposal's optimism set the tone and the trap. It suggested that "a significant advance can be made" in one summer with ten people. The gap between that expectation and what was delivered is what the first winter was made of.