The history of Artificial Intelligence goes back much further than the "early 1980s". It goes at least back to the conference at Dartmouth in 1956, if not back to Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".
Good point. The sentence is confusing. When I wrote it I was thinking about expert systems, which really blossomed more or less during the 80s, and not about AI as a whole. I have changed that paragraph adding some of your comments. Thanks.