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

Wed Apr 29 00:30:03 PDT 2026

Hello.

Thank you for these notes.

>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>.

Of course, long before Google made this available, and still now, ELIZA is  available within the (mainly Lisp implemented) text editor, emacs:  "esc-x" and then, in the minibuffer, "doctor".

All my best,
Carl

________________________________________
From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Charles Melvin Ess via Air-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Wednesday 29 April 2026 07:12
To: Ulf-Dietrich Reips; air-l
Subject: Re: [Air-L] ARPANET resurrection update and possible significances?

[External Email] This email originated outside of Trinity College Dublin. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognise the sender and know the content is safe.

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/
>
>

_______________________________________________
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/