Code for ELIZA, the OG chatbot, found

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum published a journal article detailing ELIZA, "a program … which makes certain types of natural language conversation between man and computer possible." He had created the first chatbot and named it after Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney character from Pygmalion and its musical adaptation, My Fair Lady.

Although chatbots purporting to be ELIZA have existed online for decades, they are all "knock-offs," according to New Scientist article. The original code was not published anywhere and was believed to be lost, but a team of researchers from the ELIZA Archaeology Project found it in the MIT archives.

While the team found most of the code, they had to reconstruct approximately 4% to restore it completely. The complete source code for ELIZA is only 420 lines. Once they had the code, they still had several hoops to jump through to get it to run.

Getting this decades-old code running again required the team to construct a teetering tower of obsolete software. The original experiments at MIT were done on an IBM 7094 mainframe computer, so software that emulated that machine on a modern computer was the first step. Then the MIT CTSS – the operating system used by the university at that time – had to be run on top. Above that was the MAD-SLIP programming language that Weizenbaum also created, and in which ELIZA was written, and then finally ELIZA's code running on the highest level.

The ELIZA Archaeology Project site has the complete source code and a live version of ELIZA, which you can try out. The team is also working on a book about the history and impact of ELIZA.

Previously: Eliza: what makes you think I'm a psychotherapeutic chatbot?