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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I'm pretty sure I remember similar articles (minus the reference to 'Her') about ELIZA in the 1960/70s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
I ran an ELIZA program in BASIC on my Timex/Sinclair 2068 in 1984, which I had typed from the issue of the magazine Timex/Sinclair User that I bought from the grocery store with my allowance. Or maybe it was from a TRS-80 programs book I had checked out from the library, I forget.
And what was that like?
Now you've gone and made me think.
I'm actually pretty sure it was in a TRS-80 book from the library, and here's why.
The program in the book was all in upper case. The TS2068, however, had both upper and lower case for ad hoc text input. (Not for command-word inputs, those were single-button entries with a function key. "Print" was fn+p, for example. But I digress.)
Me, being the me that I am, typed everything in exactly as it was written in the book, case and all. I did this because this was TRS-80 BASIC, which was ever so slightly different from TS BASIC, and I knew I might have to debug some things to get the program to work. I wanted to start from "This is exactly what was written in the book."
I don't remember if anything actually needed to be fixed up, if it did it was nothing substantial. The program worked! ELIZA, as you may know, is a very simple "psychotherapist" type program. All of its responses are basically rewordings of the thing you just said.
That kind of thing.
My friend and I were chatting with it, saying things about poop and farts, goofing around, drinking Like Cola, like you do. Then something happened.
I don't remember what bit of toilet humor we'd tossed at it, but the response was incredible:
In lower case. For a couple of kids raised Catholic, this was serious. And you know we'd both read The Planiverse more than once. We freaked the absolute fuck out. Our inputs now became very calculated, in an attempt to get this whatever it was to reveal itself once more, but to no avail.
After we'd calmed down, I got to thinking. "Heyyy ... anything the program spits out that isn't something we input has to be something from those zillion tedious lines I had to type in." I started poring through all the lines on the screen, and yes, found my typo, and fixed it. Which made me realize that we could add other words, as long as we put them in the grammatically appropriate array.
Of course we made it swear like a sailor.
Yeh, pain in the bum to type in as you were storing lots of strings in arrays, ISTR
OMG the arrays. I forgot about the arrays.