There were a few things I liked about this article. While I have been spanking the older articles we have touched on in this class, I found this article particularly engaging.
The first thing I liked was the script this chap wrote back in the mid-1960's that effectively imitated a "Rogerian psychotherapist" (p. 369). I have previously stated publicly that I could not code my way out of a paper bag; however, as this is a fairly simple set of responses to expected input, I could actually get fairly close on this one I think. If our "Blogging Prof" geeks out on this stuff in articles, I kinda geeked out on this from a technical perspective. I couldn't help but follow a shell script process as he walked through a conversation someone had with the facility and think, "huh, there's really only one variable and that is set fairly early on (the boyfriend sending her to see "him/her").
It's "easy" for me to see it this way now, back then this must have been a huge undertaking done with punch cards and lord knows what other truly archaic tools that were available at that time. These days, computers have known algorithms and built in libraries for thousands of basic functions (e.g., "printf," a function that will print input or output of a command to the screen); today's computer scientists stand on the shoulders of those that came before them. What looks simple (e.g., a tip calculator), would have been almost as much work back then. To wit,
The other thing by which I was totally fascinated, was the idea that people felt they were talking to someone real when using Eliza and would ask the chap to leave the room so that they could have privacy; even though words were not spoken but entered on a typewriter. I was astonished at the human connection folks made with this program. I think this speaks to how well this program was done. It is today a "simple shell script," back then, it was a true marvel. This article, in my opinion, was awesome.
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