ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system
This work preserves a historical artifact in computing, allowing modern users to experience the first chatbot on its original platform, but it is incremental as it focuses on restoration rather than new development.
The researchers restored the original ELIZA chatbot by recovering its code from archives and running it on a recreated CTSS time-sharing system, making it open-source for use on Unix-like operating systems.
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.