There've been cycles & fads in the meantime, though.

I remember that in the early 90s, neural nets were supposed to be the huge new thing. Many scanners shipped with built-in OCR, the Apple Newton had handwriting recognition on a PDA, and my Centris 660AV could do speech recognition & text-to-speech out of the box.

But they ultimately weren't powerful enough to satisfy customers or meaningfully change how people interacted with computers, so they failed in the market, and the hype cycle moved on to the World Wide Web.

I guess this shows the power of continuing to study something when the fad goes away, so that you're well positioned to capitalize when the next fad hits.