Marvin Minsky published A Framework for Representing Knowledge in June 1974 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This document introduced frames as a method to handle stereotyped situations that computers struggle to process.
Information within these structures divides into unchanging data and terminals that usually change. Terminals function similarly to variables in programming languages while top-level frames carry facts always true about a problem.
KL-ONE became one of the most influential early systems following KRL. Robert MacGregor later developed Loom as a widely used successor to KL-ONE at the Information Sciences Institute.
Frame languages required allowing frames or classes to have two or more superclasses through multiple inheritance. Many object-oriented languages eventually preferred single inheritance to maintain modularity even though early frame languages lacked message passing until developer demands forced changes.
Researchers like Schank and Abelson used frames to illustrate how AI systems could process common human interactions such as ordering a meal at a restaurant. These scholars were less interested in mathematical formality believing formalisms did not model average human conceptualization well.