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

Tue Apr 28 23:12:16 PDT 2026

Hi Ulf,

And many thanks in turn for the pointer to the CHM. I can only imagine 
how valuable and enjoyable those live demos must have been for you and 
your students - lucky you!

Even better - especially for those of us not within reasonable travel 
distance to Mountain View, CA - as Jacob Johanssen helpfully pointed 
out, it has been possible for some time to interact with a version of 
ELIZA at <https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/home>.

In retrospect, moreover, I see that I may not have been as clear as to 
why I called attention to the possibility of running a version of ELIZA 
on the reconstructed ARPANET. I meant to highlight ELIZA as a test 
scenario for getting acquainted with the reconstructed ARPANET project 
was that interacting with the program gives a new user some experience 
with the, um, leisurely pace of the communication across the network, 
along with the (quickly irritating) sounds of the teletype at work, etc.
I haven't spent enough time there to see how far / easy it might be to 
strike up a conversation with someone else online to go still further: 
so I thought this might be as good a place as any to start with.

Clearly: this is the golden opportunity to start up the Association of 
ARPANET Researchers... ;-)

In the meantime: I'm further grateful for these pointers as they 
prompted me to check further into a particular curiosity I've had for 
quite some time regarding the ELIZA / DOCTOR programs themselves.
As a start, I'm not sure which version of the program is on offer at the 
elizaarcheology site.
Not that it matters much to most of us - but as the terrific paper by 
Lane et al (including our colleague David M. Berry) explains, 
Weizenbaum's original 1963 version was written in MAD-LISP - whereas the 
version that became "the lingua franca of AI" was a clone written in 
1966 by Bernie Cosell in LISP (Lane et al, 2025: 
<10.1109/MAHC.2025.3564095>)

The latter version has also been available for some time for those of us 
lucky enough to have a PiDP-10 sitting on our desk - a Raspberry-Pi 
driven emulator / replica of the DEC PDP-10 that was used at MIT, among 
other places, in those days.
This also appears to be the version available to the rest of us now via 
the ARPANET reconstruction project I mentioned:
<https://obsolescence.dev/arpanet_home#>
when following their first 2026 scenario:
SCENARIO 1: MIT-AI DOCTOR === HOST #134
Engaging the latter opens up the same ITS operating system at work in 
the PiDP-10 instantiation of ELIZA; both invoke LISP alone, etc.

So I wonder if the version on elizaarcheology is the Cosell version 
rather than the more recently discovered (2025) and only very recently 
reconstructed (2026) Weizenbaum version in MAD-LISP?
Perhaps Jacob Johanssen and/or David Berry will know off the tops of 
their very capacious heads?

In any case, kudos to David Berry and his colleagues who further made 
the Weizenbaum MAD-LISP version available to anyone working in a 
UNIX-like environment:
<https://github.com/rupertl/eliza-ctss?tab=readme-ov-file#readme>
(Lane et al, 2025, p. 76)

David was also interviewed on the reconstruction of this earliest 
version here:
<https://www.livescience.com/technology/eliza-the-worlds-1st-chatbot-was-just-resurrected-from-60-year-old-computer-code?utm_term=8DDEC852-88AE-4919-AD0B-90BD6C9ADF42&lrh=3bdc5f1f89a97990a9d08608f0f21ea9c0780388e06c7978eb76754af35fa781&utm_campaign=368B3745-DDE0-4A69-A2E8-62503D85375D&utm_medium=email&utm_content=081CB850-2969-4326-93EB-7FF1B59A73E7&utm_source=SmartBrief>

Again, many thanks all around - and happy hacking!
- c.

On 26/04/2026 15:33, Ulf-Dietrich Reips wrote:
> Hello Charles, all:
> thank you for the pointer to the wonderful ARPANET recreation project.
> 
> The computer history musuem (https://computerhistory.org) used to have a 
> live demo of the original ELIZA, which for us in psychology and 
> psychotherapy research became very important in both showing how 
> simulation could inform us about effective ingredients of psychotherapy 
> and how computers could contribute to mental health. I visited the 
> museum first in Boston at its original location and some years ago also 
> in Mountain View.
> 
> The museum provides both very insightful explanations AND the hands-on 
> experience needed to at least partly make young people understand what 
> it was like to experience software on pre-Internet computers and the 
> beginning Internet. The exhibition was very nicely done, I highly 
> recommend a visit.
> 
> Best wishes from Europe,
> ulf
> 
> At 11:12 Uhr +0200 26.04.2026, Charles Melvin Ess via Air-L wrote:
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
>> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
>> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/ 
>> listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>>
>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>> http://www.aoir.org/
> 
> 