A few days ago Jeff Shrager posted that James Markevitch translated some 1966 BBN paper tape source code with the oldest known Eliza program. (Jeff’s site, elizagen.org, tracks the genealogy of Eliza.)

Picture from elizagen.org

The 1966 Eliza code is on github.

Jeff’s post prompted some historical context from Jeff Barrett:

The original Eliza was moved to the ANFS Q32 at SDC (one of the (D)ARPA block grant sites) in the mid 1960’s. The programmer responsible was John Burger who was involved with many early AI efforts. Somehow, John talked to one of the Playboy writers and the next thing we knew, there was an article in Playboy much to Weizenbaum’s and everybody else’s horror. We got all sorts of calls from therapists who read the article and wanted to contribute their “expertise” to make the program better. Eventually we prepared a stock letter and phone script to put off all of this free consulting.

The crisis passed when the unstoppable John Burger invited a husband and wife, both psychology profs at UCLA, to visit SDC and see the Doctor in action. I was assigned damage control and about lost it when both visitors laughed and kept saying the program was perfect! Finally, one of them caught their breath and finished the sentence: “This program is perfect to show our students just exactly how NOT to do Rogerian* therapy. *I think Rogerian was the term used but it’s been a while.

A little latter we were involved in the (D)ARPA Speech Understanding Research (SUR) Program and some of the group was there all hours of day and night. Spouses and significant others tended to visit particularly in the crazy night hours and kept getting in our way. We would amuse them by letting them use Eliza on the Q32 Time Sharing System. One day, the Q32 became unavailable in those off hours for a long period of time. We had a Raytheon 704 computer in the speech lab that I thought we could use to keep visitors happy some of the time. So one weekend I wrote an interpretive Lisp system for the 704 and debugged it the next Monday. The sole purpose of this Lisp was to support Eliza. Someone else adopted the Q32 version to run on the new 704 Lisp. So in less than a week, while doing our normal work, we had a new Lisp system running Eliza and keeping visitors happy while we did our research.

The 704 Eliza system, with quite a different script, was used to generate a conversation with a user about the status of a computer. The dialogue was very similar to one with a human playing the part of a voice recognition and response system where the lines are noisy. The human and Eliza dialogues were included/discussed in A. Newell, et al., "Speech Understanding Systems; Final Report of a Study Group,” Published for Artificial Intelligence by North-Holland/ American Elsevier (1973). The content of that report was all generated in the late 1960s but not published immediately.

The web site, http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/, has a little more information about the Raytheon 704 Lisp. The SUR program was partially funded and on-going by 1970.