Abstract Edward Feigenbaum is Professor of Computer Science and Co-director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, California, home of the pioneering expert systems Mycin (diagnostic medicine) and Dendral (analytical chemistry). In 1983 he was co-author, with Pamela McCorduck, of the best-selling book, ‘The Fifth Generation’. Last December he followed this with ‘The Rise of the Expert Company’, written with McCorduck and his wife Penny Nii, a senior research scientist at the Stanford laboratory. The rise of the expert (i.e. expert system using) company produced some surprises, he tells Kenneth Owen in this interview for Computer Bulletin.