nice work! and a question

[meshula]

This is a really great reproduction of Yann's paper, I really appreciate seeing the kind of project you've undertaken here, and good detective work in reconstructing the portions of the paper that were glossed over.

I've got a large library of neural network texts and papers from the late 1980s when I was practicing in NN, in case you're wondering about my interest :) By 1989, back propagation was well established as a technique, and had been popularized by Rumelhart & McLelland's Parallel Distributed Programming textbooks, and was already frequently used in research robotics applications in several other domains.

I'm curious therefore, why you're calling the paper the earliest real-world application of a neural net trained with back propagation? It's early, but not the earliest.