ELIZA, often considered the world's first chatbot, was written by Joseph Weizenbaum in the early 1960s. Weizenbaum did not intend to invent the chatbot, but rather to build a platform for research into human-machine conversation and the important cognitive processes of interpretation and misinterpretation. His purpose was obscured by ELIZA's fame, resulting in large part from the fortuitous timing of it's creation, and it's escape into the wild. In this paper I provide a rich historical context for ELIZA's creation, demonstrating that ELIZA arose from the intersection of some of the central threads in the technical history of AI. I also briefly discuss how ELIZA escaped into the world, and how its accidental escape, along with several coincidental turns of the programming language screws, led both to the misapprehension that ELIZA was intended as a chatbot, and to the loss of the original ELIZA to history for over 50 years.

翻译：ELIZA常被视为世界上首个聊天机器人，由约瑟夫·魏岑鲍姆于20世纪60年代初开发。魏岑鲍姆的本意并非发明聊天机器人，而是构建一个研究人机对话及解释与误解等重要认知过程的平台。其初衷因ELIZA的声名而隐没——这种声名很大程度上源于其诞生时机的偶然性及其在公众领域的意外传播。本文通过详实的历史背景分析，揭示ELIZA的诞生实为人工智能技术史若干核心脉络交汇的产物。文中亦简要探讨了ELIZA如何流入公众视野，并阐明其意外传播及编程语言设计中若干巧合性转折，如何共同导致世人误认ELIZA是作为聊天机器人而设计，并使原始版ELIZA在历史中湮没长达五十余年。