What are the Origins of CLIPS?
The origins of CLIPS date back to 1984 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. At this time, the Artificial Intelligence Section had developed over a dozen prototype expert systems applications using state-of-the-art hardware and software. However, despite extensive demonstrations of the potential of expert systems, few of these applications were put into regular use. This failure to provide expert systems technology within NASA’s operational computing constraints could largely be traced to the use of LISP as the base language for nearly all expert system software tools at that time. The Artificial Intelligence Section felt that the use of a conventional language, such as C, would eliminate most of these problems. Although a number of tool vendors started converting their tools to run in C, the cost of each tool was still very high, most were restricted to a small variety of computers, and the projected availability times were discouraging. To meet all of its needs in a timely and cost effecti
