Re: Looking for an old A2 program

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Val Golding replied:

>On 19 May 2002 08:23:40 GMT, mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote:
>
>>Terry & Utahna Olsen wrote:
>>
>>>Remember that old "Artificial intelligence" program that you could "chat"
>>>with?  It was supposed to be a bratty little girl.  I think it was written
>>>in Integer or Applesoft.  Anyway, what was it's name and can it be
>>>downloaded anywhere?
>>
>>If you mean "Eliza", it wasn't a bratty little girl, it was a Rogerian
>>therapist in style.  Basically, it reflecting what you said back to
>>you in a surprisingly natural way by performing simple linguistic
>>analysis of the input and transforming it to produce the output.
>>(Except occasionally, when the program detected that things
>>were getting stuck--when it would ask about something off the wall.)
>>
>>It began life as an academic exercise, written by Joseph Wiezenbaum
>>at MIT on the MAC time-sharing system as a kind of demo.  It was
>>named after Eliza Doolittle, who was taught "how to speak" in Shaw's
>>Pygmalion (the source of My Fair Lady).
>>
>>There's a nice article on it by Weizenbaum at:
>>
>>http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html
>>
>>Many other implementations followed the lead of the original,
>>and some were written in BASIC.
>>
>>-michael
>
>"Eliza" came long before the Mac was a gleam in Woz's eye. I had a
>copy of Eliza in early 1978.

Hi, Val--it's good to see you in the newsgroup!

The MAC I was referring to was not the Macintosh, but MIT's Project MAC
(for Mathematics and Computation), which was a very influential early
experiment in timesharing in the US.  It was done in the early- to mid-60s.
The hardware hosting it was a modified IBM 7094.

It was considered a success, and led to the much more grandiose plan
for MULTICS on a GE 635/645 system.

Eliza is really quite old from a computer perspective!

It should be noted that this program depended on an interactive
implementation, so it would not have been possible in a batch
environment.

-michael

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