Although expert systems and knowledge engineering are attracting great attention there is still confusion about what they are. Most expert systems deal with problems which are familiar to other disciplines and their distinctive character is not always recognised. This tutorial describes the origins of expert systems in Artificial Intelligence, and the technical concept of “knowledge”. The central feature is the ideal of explicitly representing knowledge as facts, rules and other symbolic structures, rather than the traditional representation as abstract numbers or algorithms. These developments yield new solutions to old problems, and ways of solving problems whcih have previously been thought to be the preserve of the human intellect.