A quick side note: in the 17 years which have passed since the post you cite had been written historiography of connectionism moved on, and we now know that modern backpropagation was invented as early as 1970 and first applied to neural nets in 1982 (technology transfer was much harder before web search!), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation#Modern_backpropagation and references thereof
A quick side note: in the 17 years which have passed since the post you cite had been written historiography of connectionism moved on, and we now know that modern backpropagation was invented as early as 1970 and first applied to neural nets in 1982 (technology transfer was much harder before web search!), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation#Modern_backpropagation and references thereof