'Inventing ELIZA' prints the rediscovered 1960s source code

The MIT Press book Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI, published July 14, 2026, prints the rediscovered original source code of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA alongside scripts that had been missing for decades.

Eight authors, led by Sarah Ciston and David M. Berry, pulled the material out of archives at MIT, Stanford, and UCLA. The 350-page paperback is the first comprehensive critical analysis of the 1966 chatbot through what the authors call critical code studies, and it argues DOCTOR, the famous psychotherapist persona, was 'merely one application of the larger ELIZA system.' Weizenbaum, the authors say, built 'a chatbot within a conversational programming environment' between 1965 and 1968, with 'previously unknown innovations well ahead of its time.'

Weizenbaum himself, writing at the time, said he had 'clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately and usefully addressed in intimate terms.' His design intent, the book notes, was that the system's 'principal objective in use was the concealment of its lack of understanding.'

The namesake is Eliza Doolittle from Shaw's Pygmalion, a character taught to perform upper-class status through language. The authors follow the 'problematic assumptions of gender and class' carried in that name into later systems, from Microsoft's Tay to Alexa.

The book is open access through MIT Press Direct, funded by MIT Libraries and Distinctive Collections, with a companion site at findingeliza.org. Four researchers in our Who's Who directory shared the source link the week of release.