ELIZA's Lost Code: 2,600 Lines Found in MIT Archives in 2021, Retyped by Hand
demian_ai · x · 2026-11-12
A look back at "Eliza", J. Weizenbaum's 1966 MIT fake therapist: 9 pages, 300 lines of BASIC. It scans your input for triggers like "i need", picks a canned reply like "why do you need", and pastes the rest of your sentence after it.
Key details:
- Weizenbaum's secretary, after watching him build it for months, sat down, chatted a few exchanges, then asked him to leave the room
- He wrote an entire 1976 book about how uneasy that made him
- His original code was never published; it turned up in a folder in MIT's archives in 2021 — 2,600 lines on paper that wouldn't OCR, so the restoration team typed it back in by hand
The author's take: knowing the trick never stopped anyone from feeling something, then or now — typing it in gave you a front-row seat to the trick and the feeling at the same time.
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