ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system

Code

• github.com/rupertl/eliza-ctss
  OfficialIn papernone★ 305
• github.com/anthay/eliza
  OfficialIn papernone★ 173

Abstract

ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is usually considered the world's first chatbot. It was developed in MAD-SLIP on MIT's CTSS, the world's first time-sharing system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum's archives at MIT, including an early version of the famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and FAP. Here we describe the reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, itself running on an emulated IBM 7094. The entire stack is open source, so that any user of a unix-like OS can run the world's first chatbot on the world's first time-sharing system.

Tasks

Reproductions