ELIZA II - ELIZA and Interactive computing.

In 1966, interactive computing (via a teletype) was new. It was 15 years before the personal computer became familiar to the general public, and three decades before most people encountered attempts at natural language processing in Internet services like Ask.com or PC help systems such as Microsoft Office Clippy. Although those programs included years of research and work, ELIZA remains a milestone simply because it was the first time a programmer had attempted such a human-machine interaction with the goal of creating the illusion (however brief) of human-human interaction.

In the 1976 article "Computer Power and Human Reason," an excerpt of which is included in The New Media Reader edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, Weizenbaum notes how quickly and deeply people became emotionally involved with the computer program, taking offence when he asked to view the transcripts, saying it was an invasion of their privacy, even asking him to leave the room while they were working with the DOCTOR script.

ELIZA had an impact on a number of early computer games by demonstrating additional kinds of interface designs. Don Daglow wrote an enhanced version of the program called Ecala on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College in 1973 before writing what was possibly the second or third computer role-playing game, Dungeon (1975) (The first was probably "dnd", written on and for the PLATO system in 1974, and the second may have been Moria, written in 1975). It is likely that ELIZA was also on the system where Will Crowther created Colossal Cave (Adventure), the 1975 game that spawned the interactive fiction genre. Both these games appeared some nine years after the original ELIZA.

There are many programs based on ELIZA in different languages. For example, in 1980, a company called "Don't Ask Software", founded by Randy Simon, created a version called "Abuse" for the Apple II, Atari, and Commodore PCs, which verbally abused the user based on the user's input. Other versions adapted ELIZA around a religious theme, such as ones featuring Jesus (both serious and comedic) and another Apple II variant called I Am Buddha. The 1980 game The Prisoner incorporated ELIZA-style interaction within its gameplay.

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0