The majority of the examples in the textbook were just simple decision trees! Trivial to flowchart. And if you can follow a troubleshooting flowchart, you are already doing what the "expert system" does.
Pretty much. I remember typing in "Animal Guess" on my Vic-20 from an article in Compute. I was so amazed by it that I convinced my dad to get an 8k, then a 16k, then a 3 board adapter so I could run 24k of memory to keep it going. Then when I ran out of memory and patience with the tape drive I programmed it to bring in parts of the tree from the floppy disk....
First program I ever worked on that ate an entire 1541 floppy drive with animal information. Amazing....
C
