[Air-L] ARPANET resurrection update and possible significances?

[Charles Melvin Ess]

Hi AoIRists,

As I mentioned in an earlier note to Morten Bay, there is an active 
project to recreate the ARPANET from ca. 1972. You can see the update here:

<https://obsolescence.dev/arpanet_home>

Including the chance to log in yourself to one of the now 35 working nodes.

One of the documents referenced here is titled

SCENARIOS for using the ARPANET at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON 
COMPUTER COMMUNICATION, Washington, D.C., October 24-26, 1972

and is in fact reproduced in the pages giving further instructions on 
logging in - along with 2026 scenarios that might also be fun to play with.

One of the available programs from the MIT.AI node is:
==
DOCTOR is a LISP program written by Joseph Weizenbaum and described in 
"ELIZA - A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language 
Communication Between Man And Machine" in the Communications of the ACM, 
January 1966.
DOCTOR simulates a psychiatric interview with a Rogerian psychotherapist.
==
(I'll come back to this below.)

I know that ARPANET is central to the work of e.g.,Janet Abbate's early 
history, _Inventing the Internet_ (1999).
But what I'm asking here, especially of historians who know these 
domains far better than I:
1) how far did these early exchanges, so far as they could be followed 
and/or documented - and/or, as at least some study of primary aims, 
practices, affordances, etc. might have been possible - enter into early 
research on CMC?
2) Might this reconstruction project, insofar as it grants access to 
"the rest of us," be of possible use / interest for historical / current 
research on CMC and its descendants?
E.g., I know a great deal has been written about ELIZA - but, to my 
knowledge at least, not with direct access to the working program 
itself. I suspect the working program would give researchers a chance to 
not only become much more familiar with how the program works and 
"behaves," but also to try out hypotheses as to how different sorts of 
engagements, expectations, etc. might be dis/confirmed through actually 
using it?

In any case, to quote the welcome message from the first terminal I 
tried: Happy Hacking!

- charles