1984, a friend of mine bought a Kaypro II and got a floppy with a BASIC ELIZA on it. We ran it and quickly found it shallow and anodyne. So we started looking at the files on the disk and found a dictionary file, which we opened. The first word in the dictionary was four letters long and began with an 'F'. "That's it," said my friend, "we just haven't been talking dirty enough to it."
My first (and only firsthand experience) with Eliza was running it on a Mac 512 on probably System 6 in a 7th grade classroom (one of the teachers collected the old antique Macs the school was going to throw out and ran them in the back of her classroom). It got stuck in loops and frequently asked the same questions over and over, even at that age it was pretty obvious what it was doing, but pretty neat. Hopefully this genealogy gets updated to include some of the earlier versions
Both you and @FrankWilhoit were probably using a version of E12 (Shrager73BASIC). Because it was so simple (200 lines of BASIC), and was published in Creative Computing in 1977, that particular root led to uncountable knock offs. (And it’s not at all surprising that many included swearing!)
1984, a friend of mine bought a Kaypro II and got a floppy with a BASIC ELIZA on it. We ran it and quickly found it shallow and anodyne. So we started looking at the files on the disk and found a dictionary file, which we opened. The first word in the dictionary was four letters long and began with an 'F'. "That's it," said my friend, "we just haven't been talking dirty enough to it."
My first (and only firsthand experience) with Eliza was running it on a Mac 512 on probably System 6 in a 7th grade classroom (one of the teachers collected the old antique Macs the school was going to throw out and ran them in the back of her classroom). It got stuck in loops and frequently asked the same questions over and over, even at that age it was pretty obvious what it was doing, but pretty neat. Hopefully this genealogy gets updated to include some of the earlier versions
Both you and @FrankWilhoit were probably using a version of E12 (Shrager73BASIC). Because it was so simple (200 lines of BASIC), and was published in Creative Computing in 1977, that particular root led to uncountable knock offs. (And it’s not at all surprising that many included swearing!)
Thanks! Very interesting, I can dig into this further now.