R1 (expert system)

The R1 (internally called XCON, for eXpert CONfigurer) program was a production-rule-based system written in OPS5 by John P. McDermott of CMU in 1978 to assist in the ordering of DEC's VAX computer systems by automatically selecting the computer system components based on the customer's requirements. The development of XCON followed two previous unsuccessful efforts to write an expert system for this task, in FORTRAN and BASIC.