I took a university-level AI course in 1997, and I can tell you that GP is 100% correct. The course itself was mostly about how to teach humans to define what they wanted precisely enough to actually ask a computer to do it (utility functions, logic, Baysean mathematics, etc). Neural networks were touched on, of course; but the state of the art at the time was search.
Compiler optimization? AI. Map routing? AI. SQL query optimizer? AI.
I can't find it right now, but there used to be somewhere on the sqlite.org website that describes its query optimizer as an AI. Classically speaking, that's 100% correct.
Obviously there was always in people's minds the idea of AI being AGI; the course also covered Searle's Chinese Room argument and so on, "strong AI" vs "weak AI" and so on. But the nuts and bolts of artificial intelligence research was nowhere near anything like an AGI.