I first heard about Cyc as a child in a TV documentary about AI. The example involved a man shaving with an electric razor. Cyc concluded that while shaving the man was not human since the razor was an electrical device and electrical devices were not human. It really caught my imagination as a child and made me want to study AI. The magic diminished a bit once I learned more about how Cyc worked using prolog style relations and I ended up studying CS instead of AI but I still credit Cyc with sparking that initial interest in me.
Lenart seems like a strange man but we need obsessives and true believers like him to push through the various "winters". Who knows if knowledge graphs like Cyc will become relevant again in future as we seek to eliminate hallucinations from statistical learning.
seemed.
Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago (which I wish I had known before now!)