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通常被认为是世界上第一个聊天机器人，由约瑟夫·魏泽鲍姆在20世纪60年代初编写。魏泽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以及解释与误解这一重要认知过程的平台。其初衷被ELIZA的盛名所掩盖——这种盛名很大程度上源于其诞生时机的偶然性及其在非受控环境中的传播。本文通过详实的历史背景梳理，论证ELIZA的诞生处于人工智能技术史若干核心脉络的交汇点。同时简要探讨ELIZA如何传播至学术界之外，并分析其意外传播与编程语言设计中若干巧合性转向，如何共同导致学界误认为ELIZA是作为聊天机器人而设计，以及原始ELIZA系统为何在历史中湮没长达五十余年。