Another Wave: A BASIC ELIZA Turns the PC Generation On to AI

Table of Links

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2. Why ELIZA?
3. The Intelligence Engineers
4. Newell, Shaw, and Simon’s IPL Logic Theorist: The First True AIs
5. From IPL to SLIP and Lisp
6. A Critical Tangent into Gomoku
7. Interpretation is the Core of Intelligence
8. The Threads Come Together: Interpretation, Language, Lists, Graphs, and Recursion
9. Finally ELIZA: A Platform, Not a Chat Bot!
10. A Perfect Irony: A Lisp ELIZA Escapes and is Misinterpreted by the AI Community
11. Another Wave: A BASIC ELIZA turns the PC Generation on to AI
12. Conclusion: A certain danger lurks there
13. Acknowledgements and References

11 Another Wave: A BASIC ELIZA turns the PC Generation on to AI

Another defining event in ELIZA’s descendancy occurred almost exactly a decade later, in 1977 Creative Computing, one of the magazines that, along with BYTE, was the “Hacker News” and “GitHub” of the mid-70s personal computer explosion, published an ELIZA knock-off written in BASIC.[36] This was coincidentally well-timed as it coincided nearly exactly with the so-called “1977 trinity”: The year that the Commodore Pet, the Apple II, and the TRS-80 all appeared.[12] Within a few years, millions of computer hobbyists – neither academics nor otherwise professionally involved with computers – had personal computers of all sorts, mostly with BASIC as their primary user-level programming language. Not a small number of those hobbyists were interested enough by the possibility of AI – perhaps with HAL9000, the murderous computer from 2001[13], still in recent memory – to type in this BASIC ELIZA (which was only a couple pages of code), and experiment with it themselves. Because of its simplicity, and the personal computer explosion, this ELIZA begat hundreds of knock-offs through the decades, in every conceivable programming language, making it perhaps the most copied and knocked-off program in history.[16] Just as Cosell’s Lisp ELIZA was spread by the ARPANet, this BASIC ELIZA, was spread by the wide-spread availability of personal computers.

As a result of these coincidences, and an inherent interest in AI (or at least in talking with computers) the version of ELIZA that was known in the academic community was Cosell’s Lisp version, and the version known to the public was the BASIC version. But until it was rediscovered in 2021, the original MADSLIP ELIZA, was forgotten, and had not been seen by anyone for at least 50 years.[16, 14]

[16] Indeed, I curate a web site, ELIZAGen.org[14], dedicated to the history of ELIZA and ELIZA-like programs. In that capacity I am regularly sent new, or newly-discovered knockoffs of one or another of the ELIZA threads, usually my own BASIC ELIZA. Just last week, as I write this in April of 2024, I received an email pointing out a version of my ELIZA that ended up, through channels unknown, in Apple’s HyperCard programmable notecard system for the original Apple Macintosh computers.[15]