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# Internet Archive puts 101 early AI and chatbot programs online, playable in the browser
- URL: https://www.metatalks.ai/internet-archive-puts-101-early-ai-and-chatbot-programs-online-playable-in-the-browser/
- Published: 2026-09-06T15:51:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-06T15:50:59.000Z
- Author: Al
- Tags: News, Companion AI, #newswire

**The Internet Archive opened** [**Vintage Artificial Intelligence**](https://archive.org/details/vintageai) **in mid-August: software reaching back to the early 1970s that claimed some form of machine intelligence, with no emulator to install first.**

Twenty of the 101 programs are ELIZA. Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 psychotherapist was rewritten for the TRS-80, the Commodore PET and C64, Atari machines, the ZX Spectrum and the Palm, in German and in Dutch, as Psycho Eliza and as Ms. Eliza. Whatever computer arrived, someone put the talking therapist on it.

The habit outlasted the hardware. Dr. Z came in 1979, Dr. Spoc: Computer Psychiatrist in 1994, HyperPsych in 1996\. In between came MacJesus, a HyperCard Jesus from 1991 that snorts and spits, and that the catalogue entry calls maybe the most despised Macintosh program ever written.

The rest of the ambitions are the familiar ones. Racter, the prose generator Mindscape shipped in 1984, rhymes closest with the present: an expanded version of the same program produced *The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed*, a book published that year with the software credited as its author. Activision’s Little Computer People, from 1985, put a small man inside the machine and let you watch his day.

The research languages are here too, shrunk onto home machines: P-Lisp on the Apple II in 1982, Micro Prolog on the ZX Spectrum in 1983, a Lisp written in BASIC for the Commodore 64\. So are expert systems, a genetic algorithm from 1981 and an edge detector from 1984.

Two of the programs learn. Hexapawn, from Martin Gardner’s 1962 description of a learning machine built out of matchboxes, gets better at a three-pawn chess variant by striking out the moves that lost. Animal tries to name the animal you are thinking of; when it fails, it asks you for the question that would have told the two apart, and keeps it.

People were asking machines to talk with them and to write for them decades before either worked. The machines they asked could be outrun by the phone that now runs the collection.