World's first chatbot restored on the world's first time-sharing system

MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA in 1966 partly to demonstrate how easy it was to convince people that a computer was intelligent. His original MAD-SLIP version of ELIZA, usually considered the world's first chatbot, is running again on its native platform for the first time in nearly 60 years. Weizenbaum's original CACM paper, ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine, is available online.

This historic breakthrough was accomplished by a team of researchers (Rupert Lane, Anthony Hay, Arthur Schwarz, and Jeff Shrager) who successfully restored ELIZA to operation on a reconstructed version of MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), running on an emulated IBM 7094. You can download the code from this GitHub repository and run it on most Linux or MacOS systems.

See this blog post describing the effort to get the original ELIZA version running and a video of the reanimated ELIZA. Read more about ELIZA on the Genealogy of ELIZA site. You can also talk to ELIZA using a version of Weizenbaum's script via a JavaScript adaptation of the original code by Anthony Hay.