[pavlov]

The “public” distinction feels anachronistic when applied to early 1960s software.

This was a time before networks and software distributions. The idea that software could be standardized and shared instead of written for a particular computer was not widespread.

So it’s a bit disingenuous to say that Eliza wasn’t intended as a public chatbot, when practically no software was intended to be public.

[abrax3141]

Yeah. That's actually one of the things that makes this story so interesting: It took place exactly at the dawn of the inter(arap)net, and physically close to BBN (which was the arpanet implementor), so there was lots of sharing between MIT and BBN, in particular, McCarthy put a lisp on BBN's PDP-1, and Bernie Cosell's Lisp ELIZA, which he did from the algorithm in Wiezenbaum's CACM paper, was the one that became public, so everyone thought that ELIZA had originally been implemented in Lisp, which was wrong!