A small browser tribute to Weizenbaum's DOCTOR script, the 1960s chatbot that made people feel a machine was listening.
This page runs a JavaScript port of the ELIZA idea. The literal original was MAD-SLIP on MIT CTSS for an IBM 7094. The recovered source is linked below.
Why it mattered
Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA at MIT in the mid-1960s to show how shallow a conversation with a computer could be. The famous DOCTOR script imitated a Rogerian therapist, the kind who often reflects your own words back at you.
The hack: ELIZA did not understand people. It searched for keywords, flipped pronouns, and wrapped your sentence in a question. I feel afraid of computers could become Do computers worry you? or Do you often feel afraid of computers?
The shock was not that ELIZA was intelligent. It was that people still felt heard. Weizenbaum found this disturbing, and ELIZA became the classic warning about how easily language makes us imagine a mind behind the machine.