This doesn't directly address your question, though it perhaps can give you some pointers if you want to read about the history of AI and the AI winter of the '80s, but in a way SHRDLU featured prominently in the AI winter, at least in Europe, particularly in the UK.
So, in the UK at least the AI winter was precipitated by the Lighthill Report, a report published in 1973, compiled by a Sir James Lighthill and commissioned by the British Research Council, i.e. the people who held all the research money at the time in the UK. The report was furiously damning of AI research of the time, mostly because of grave misunderstandings e.g. with respect to combinatorial explosion and basically accused researchers of, well, faffing about and not doing anything useful with their grant money. The only exception to this was SHRDLU, that Lighthill praised as an example of how AI should be done.
Anyway, if you have time, you can watch the televised debate between Lighthill and three luminaries of AI, John McCarthy (the man who named the field, created Lisp and did a few other notable things), Donald Michie (known for his MENACE reinforcement-learning program running on... matchboxes, and basically setting up AI research in the UK) and Richard Gregorie (a cognitive scientist from the US for whom I confess I don't know much). The (short) wikipedia article on the Lighthill Report has links to all the youtube videos:
It's interesting to see in the videos the demonstration of the Freddy robot from Edinburgh, that was capable of constructing objects by detecting their components with early machine vision techniques. In the 1960's. Incidentally:
Even with today's knowledge, methodology, software tools, and so on, getting a robot to do this kind of thing would be a fairly complex and ambitious project.
The above was written sometime in the '90s, I reckon but it is still true today. Unfortunately, Lighthill's report killed the budding robotics research sector in the UK and it has literally never recovered since. This is typical of the AI winter of the '80s. Promising avenues of research were abandoned not because of any scientific reasons, as is sometimes assumed ("expert systems didn't scale" etc) but, rather, because pencil pushers in charge of disbursing public money didn't get the science.
Edit: A couple more pointers. John McCarthy's review of the Lighthill Report:
So, in the UK at least the AI winter was precipitated by the Lighthill Report, a report published in 1973, compiled by a Sir James Lighthill and commissioned by the British Research Council, i.e. the people who held all the research money at the time in the UK. The report was furiously damning of AI research of the time, mostly because of grave misunderstandings e.g. with respect to combinatorial explosion and basically accused researchers of, well, faffing about and not doing anything useful with their grant money. The only exception to this was SHRDLU, that Lighthill praised as an example of how AI should be done.
Anyway, if you have time, you can watch the televised debate between Lighthill and three luminaries of AI, John McCarthy (the man who named the field, created Lisp and did a few other notable things), Donald Michie (known for his MENACE reinforcement-learning program running on... matchboxes, and basically setting up AI research in the UK) and Richard Gregorie (a cognitive scientist from the US for whom I confess I don't know much). The (short) wikipedia article on the Lighthill Report has links to all the youtube videos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report
It's interesting to see in the videos the demonstration of the Freddy robot from Edinburgh, that was capable of constructing objects by detecting their components with early machine vision techniques. In the 1960's. Incidentally:
Even with today's knowledge, methodology, software tools, and so on, getting a robot to do this kind of thing would be a fairly complex and ambitious project.
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/freddy/
The above was written sometime in the '90s, I reckon but it is still true today. Unfortunately, Lighthill's report killed the budding robotics research sector in the UK and it has literally never recovered since. This is typical of the AI winter of the '80s. Promising avenues of research were abandoned not because of any scientific reasons, as is sometimes assumed ("expert systems didn't scale" etc) but, rather, because pencil pushers in charge of disbursing public money didn't get the science.
Edit: A couple more pointers. John McCarthy's review of the Lighthill Report:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi...
An article on the AI winter of the '80s by the editor of IEEE Intelligent Systems:
https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/ex/2008/02/mex2008020...