ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system

TL;DR

This paper details the reanimation of the original ELIZA chatbot from the 1960s on a restored CTSS system, making it accessible on modern Unix-like OSes and preserving early computing history.

Contribution

It presents the first successful reanimation of ELIZA on a restored CTSS, including the full open-source stack for modern users.

Findings

ELIZA was successfully reanimated on a restored CTSS

The entire system stack is open source and accessible

The project preserves early AI and computing history

Abstract

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.