On the day of December in 2024, in the depths of a virtual simulation of central decisive in the 1960s, an old line fell to life:
How are you. Please tell me your problem.
This was Elisa itself – not a replica. The first Chatbot was ever created, restoring life on the same type of computer that was running for the first time in nearly six decades.
Wait, what is Elisa?
We are all used to AIS and Chatbots at the present time, but what if I told you that the first Chatbot is about 60 years old?
It was created between 1964 and 1966 by the computer world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joseph Weisnbum, and Elisa was a simple program according to today’s standards. I have used basic patterns matching and replacing them to simulate a conversation-especially the type of open questions preferred by a Roger psychiatrist. When someone wrote, “I am sad”, Elisa may respond, “How long have you been sad?”
According to today’s standards, Elisa was charming. Private Secretary Secretary, is attracted to her responses, Request once To leave alone with her. Others poured their hearts on the device. Elisa was only known to a few people, but in that group, it became a cultural phenomenon. But as it spreads on early computing networks, something strange happened: the original version lost.
I wrote the wheat tree Ellyza in Slipping madness, A mixture of MAD (Fluencing Mick Coding) and the list of the menu processing it is called SLIP. It was run on CTSS, compatible time sharing system, hosted on IBM 7094 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. CTSS was a monster, a huge computer costing about $ 3 million. It was also the first computer to log in to the password.
CTSS ran on two tape units: one for the user and one to throw the program in the memory. The memory was 27 words (the word 36 -bit) for users, and 5 K words for the supervisor (operating system). This seems unimaginable according to today’s standards, but this was able to manage Elisa.
How did the first chatbot lost
The problem was that the device was never connected to Arpanet, the front of the Internet. Therefore, when the other programmers began rewriting Elisa in languages like LISP, their publications were spreading.
The Lisp version has become a dominant strain, rapidly traveling via ARPANET and including itself in the DNA for early artificial intelligence research. Soon after, a basic version of Elisa appeared in Creative computing Magazine in 1977, just as personal computers began reaching American homes.
As a result, most people knew that Elisa was either an academic artifact based on LISP or as a playful program written in Apple II. The original slide code faded in mystery.
Even, this is, a team of digital Sleuths decided to find it.
Discover my digital fossil
In 2021, Jeff Schregher – who wrote one of Elisa’s first cloning in the 1970s – persuaded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archive to go. They found this in a box called “computer conversations”. The interior was a printed version of the year 1965 for the original source code.
But there was a problem. The symbol was incomplete, printed in a pale ink, and in a dark coordination created before ASCII. Some lines were shortened in hidden fragments such as W'R to WHENEVER. Others extended punching cards, where lost spaces or typographical errors can be destroyed.
The only way to test this was to revive the CTSS itself – this means rebuilding IBM 7094. Thus, they did so.
Team – Robert Lin, Anthony Hay, Arthur Schwarrs, David M. Perry, and Saraj – called themselves Elisa team. Together, they set out to revive not only Elisa, but its entire environmental system.
It was a slow and dark work, and almost failed due to the presence of one error: one zero missing in the line of 1670 of a job. But when everything has been fixed and sorted, Elisa can finally speak.
All men are both.
In any way
The line echoed a copy of the 1966 Weizenbau paper. Elisa was alive again.
Can Elia … learning?
Again, we talk about simple Chatbot from the sixties. But Elisa was another surprise: you can learn.
It was buried in the re -discovered code “Place the Teacher”, which was called in writing +. This feature, barely mentioned in the published Weizenbaum works, allows users to modify the Script Scripe Live – add, remove and modify rules during flying. The program can save these changes on the disk, which is a type of primitive stability. It was not completely automated – but it alluded to something more than just canned responses. In 1966, that was revolutionary.
Elisa is part of the account history. It was present before the term “chatbot”. But this is a little more than just a piece of history. Ideas (symbolic thinking, interactive computing, psychological modeling) that laid the basis for modern AI. And revealed the human motivation to drop feelings on machines. Weizenbauum has become an explicit critic of such expectations, with a “computer as a psychological tool”.
Now more than ever, with the really start of artificial intelligence, it’s time to think about what Elisa is. It looks very simple now but it was 60 years ago. It seemed human, but it was, of course, just a algorithm. What does this say about our current artificial intelligence systems?
Journal Reference: Ruert Lane et al, Eliza Reanimated: The first chatbot in the world was restored on the participation system for the first time in the world, Arxiv (2025). Doi: 10.48550/Arxiv.2501.06707
