Backpropagation was popularised and named in 1986 (though it was likely a rediscovery, with prior art going back to the 60's), so neural nets got a new wave of interest around then coinciding with home computers fast enough to at least achieve mildly interesting results.
Yeah, AI is a perennial topic and neural nets are an old school approach. When I was in school (not really that long ago) the NN textbook taught as an old fashioned approach that never produced good results, and the professor (from the EE department) would occasionally remark that we are seeing a resurgence of this technique and you never know, it could become popular again. I think at that point it already producing impressive results, but none of us were fully aware of where it was going.
Source: https://issuu.com/zetmoon/docs/compute_gazette_issue_79_1990...