I was one of the first hires on the Cyc project when it started at MCC and was at first responsible for the decision to abandon the Interlisp-D implementation and replace it with one I wrote on Symbolics machines.
Yes, back then one person could write the code base, which has long since grown and been ported off those machines. The KB is what matters anyway. I built it so different people could work on the kb simultaneously, which was unusual in those days, even though cloud computing was ubiquitous at PARC (where Doug had been working, and I had too).
Neurosymbolic approaches are pretty important and there’s good work going on in that area. I was back in that field myself until I got dragged away to work on the climate. But I’m not sure that manually curated KBs will make much of a difference beyond bootstrapping.
I had learned about "AI" in the 80's. The promise was that with lisp and expert systems and prolog and more.
the article said cyc was reading the newspaper every day.
I thought, wow, any day now computers will leap forward. The japanese 5th generation computing will be left in the dust. :)