Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA at MIT in the mid-1960s and described it in Communications of the ACM in January 1966. Its famous script, DOCTOR, imitated a Rogerian therapist using the cheapest trick available: spot a keyword, turn the user's own sentence back into a question.
🖥 It ran in MAD-SLIP on an IBM 7094 under CTSS. Then the source vanished. For decades ELIZA survived only through reimplementations — including the one still bundled with Emacs.
In 2021 an MIT archivist, Myles Crowley, found printouts of the original in Weizenbaum's papers. Researchers reconstructed the roughly 4% that was missing, brought up an emulated 7094 running CTSS, and on 31 December 2024 ran the real thing for the first time in about half a century.
🧠 The detail Weizenbaum never got over: people confided in it anyway. His own secretary, who had watched him build the thing, asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private.
Sixty years and several trillion parameters later, the ELIZA effect remains the most reliable feature this industry has ever shipped 🙂
Next Move AI | #Facts
