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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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ELIZAGEN – ELIZA Reanimated: The Original 1965 Chatbot Restored On An Emulated IBM 7094 Running MIT’s CTSS

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/30

Wow, 60 years after her birth, the original ELIZA Chatbot got resurrected after a re-discovered paper version ¹ of the SLIP and MAD based source code was found in the Joseph Weizenbaum archives: [Wayback/Archive] ELIZAGEN – ELIZA Reanimated

Back in 1965, ELIZA ran on top of CTSS on an IBM 7094. Nowadays, few of that hardware is still running, but luckily there are emulators.

Back in the days, a large percentage people chatting with ELIZA thought she was a real person. With the dwindling language proficiency, the rise in believe in alternative facts, and THE RISE OF USE IN ALL CAPS, likely that percentage has increased.

Steps to get started with ELIZA are at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rupertl/eliza-ctss: The original ELIZA on an emulated CTSS environment, which carefully got assembled over the course of the last 2 months.

If you want to know about the process, be sure to read the

paper on arXiv
Abstract  [Wayback/Archive] [2501.06707] ELIZA Reanimated: The world’s first chatbot restored on the world’s first time sharing system
HTML [Wayback/Archive] ELIZA Reanimated: The world’s first chatbot restored on the world’s first time sharing system
PDF [Wayback/Archive] 2501.06707v1.pdf

When you just want to see how it looked like, then there is [Wayback/Archive] ELIZA running on CTSS – YouTube.

The repository was written over slightly less than two months time which you can see in the [Wayback/Archive] Commits · rupertl/eliza-ctss · GitHub and [Wayback/Archive] Commits · rupertl/eliza-ctss · GitHub – page 2/2.

There are also a few bits of documentation:

And of course there is [Wayback/Archive] ELIZA Archaeology maintained by [Wayback/Archive] ELIZA Archaeology – Team having a wealth of ELIZA information.

The big message from all this is that ELIZA is alive and kicking!

--jeroen

¹ that discovery and much more is covered at [Wayback/Archive] ELIZAGEN – Original ELIZA which is part of the site [Wayback/Archive] ELIZAGEN which has its own repository with the original re-discovered source code, MAD and SLIP documentation:

[Wayback/Archive] ELIZA running on CTSS – YouTube

This entry was posted on 2025/01/30 at 12:00 and is filed under AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, History, LISP, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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