  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.
