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5th generation computing[1]. This was an initiative by the Japanese computer industry to create a new class of highly parallel computers specialized for AI, in the early 80s, and primarily programmed in Prolog-like languages. There were people who genuinely believed that the success of this project would leapfrog Japan over the Western computing industry, in other words FOMO.

Perhaps ironically, there are some aspects of this project (parallelism and AI) that are now massively important. It's just that they were ahead of their time on those aspects, and Prolog is now largely a historical bywater.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

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In the US we had big federal funding for parallel supercomputers in the 1980s and early 1990s, these were oriented towards FORTRAN programs to simulate nuclear weapons as opposed to the Japanese 5th generation systems that were doing things closer to commercial data processing.

That research in the US was defunded in a hurry after they realized they were training foreigners how do to this stuff

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL30143.pdf

If you look at Hadoop and other developments in commercial parallel computing I'd say many of them (all the ones that don't involve some special interconnect between the processors) are more closely related to what the 5th gen project had converged on at the end... At that point they had given up on Prolog (as we know it, they did settle on a subset called KL0), Dataflow processors and other things and settled for plain ordinary message passing and "shared nothing".