In a 1958 Office of Naval Research article, Rosenblatt drew the perceptron alongside a proposed organization of the brain. Image source. Licence.
Show a machine one example of a pattern and it can store a copy. Recognizing another example that differs from the first takes something more. Frank Rosenblatt's 1958 paper introduced the perceptron as a probabilistic model for how a system could learn to organize and respond to sensory information.
Rosenblatt, a psychologist working at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, described a system with sensory, association and response units. Activity could travel from the sensory inputs through associations to a response. Experience changed how readily the system gave particular responses to patterns.
The paper asked a question about perception
The work took inspiration from nervous systems and put forward a model researchers could analyze. Its architecture and training assumptions mattered. A machine that could learn one kind of separation between patterns could still have trouble with a different arrangement.
The value of looking back at the original is seeing the question Rosenblatt was trying to answer. It was about how a pattern recognition system might acquire a useful response from experience, a problem later work tackled with different architectures and learning methods.