Indeed I remember buying a set of three conference-papers-as-books around that time, titled Artificial Neural Networks .. proceedings of the whatever the conference was.

No doubt Schmidhuber made important contributions, but I see him pop up claiming to be the 'root' of it all every couple of years.

And while it is very true that often the research coming out of Academia is useless, what is always neglected are the roots of the research done in private labs.

When Jürgen Schmidhuber and team published their work on Neural Nets back in 1991 it was also useless. Unless you had a supercomputer and very, very deep pockets you were not going to do anything with what came out of their lab.

But still, 30 years later here we are, standing on top of the shoulders of this useless research.