Neural nets were taught in my Uni in the late 90s. They were presented as the AI technique, which was however computationally infeasible at the time. Moreover, it was clearly stated that all supporting ideas were developed and researched 20 years prior, and the field was basically stagnated due to hardware not being there.

I remember reading "neural network" articles back from late 80's, early 90's, which weren't just about ANNs, but also other connectionist approaches like Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps and Stephen Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) ... I don't know how your university taught it, but back then this seemed more futuristic brain-related stuff, not a practical "AI" technique.