Oh, I remember, I just never saw it again after I graduated. I figured it was one of those things like designing analog computers that were fun but sure to be on their way out when the generation of professors who remembered building the things retired.
Yeah I don't expect to see it again... There are certainly a few subjects that, when asked about the non-academic applications, the lecturers tend to shuffle their feet awkwardly or deliver some obviously-rehearsed spiel. I guess academia is a place for those ideas to stay alive, in the hope that some future discovery then brings them back to life in an altered form. It's happened before, right? There were quite a few people in my department who seemed to be emotionally invested in the return of symbolic AI. We can only wait.
I actually have a few expert systems in production, but you'd have to have to be really into GOFAI to recognize them as such. I pointedly didn't tell my bosses I was solving those problems with AI, because if you tell people you're doing AI they assume you're doing something overly ambitious and say 'no'. I bet there are a lot of those out there.
Yeah! Open source is great and all, but so much code exists inside organisations and there's no telling what kinds of methods they're using. I have a friend at Google who mentioned offhand that employees can sift through billions of lines of internal code. I wonder how much internal software itch-scratching has found totally novel methods of solving problems. I'm not sure if it's really possible to know.