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.
@article{arxiv.2501.06707,
title = {ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system},
author = {Rupert Lane and Anthony Hay and Arthur Schwarz and David M. Berry and Jeff Shrager},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.06707},
year = {2025}
}