Scientists have just resurrected "ELIZA," the world's first chatbot, from long-lost computer code — and it still works extremely well. Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these "software archaeologists" discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life.

On December 21, 2024, just before 2 pm, scientists made the dead speak. ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot is back. Long imitated, but not perfectly replicated, ELIZA has long been thought lost. But scientists discovered an early version of its code in the archives of its creator in 2021 and have spent the intervening years piecing it back together.

A small team of researchers from the U.S. and the U.K. has resurrected the code for a 60-year-old chatbot named ELIZA, believed to be the first electronic chatbot. In their paper posted to the arXiv preprint server,