The Internet Archive has a habit of preserving unique things, ones that nobody else thought about, and its newest collection is the best example yet. I’d say it’s one that every AI historian should bookmark.
Curated under the title “Vintage Artificial Intelligence,” the collection contains decades of software that tried to convince people that they were talking to a thinking machine (though with wildly varying success).
So what exactly is in this new collection?
Created by Jason Scott, the new collection gathers emulated software from the 1970s through the 1990s. All of them are playable directly in a browser. While none of them actually think in any real sense, the idea is how convincing these decades-old programs can be at simulating the experience of talking to a real person.
Out of all the entries in the collection, ELIZA anchors the set. Joseph Weizenbaum’s DOCTOR script, which was originally built to mimic a therapist, worked so well that early users reportedly opened up to it as if it were a real person, a trick that still deserves some credit even decades later.
The software was rewritten so many times that the archive holds dozens of versions. Then there’s Racter, a commercial chatbot from 1985 that went well beyond conversation. It generated full passages of prose, and some of them were so strange that they ended up in published work. Consider it an eerie prequel to what LLMs can do today.
How do you actually try it?
Beyond the chatbots, Activision’s Alter Ego walks you through simulated life stages as a psychologist-designed decision game. On the other hand, Little Computer People, built by Pitfall! creator David Crane, imagines what it would be like if tiny people were secretly living inside your machine. If you ask me, it was oddly ahead of its time.
Suspended splits a cryogenically frozen player’s mind across six separate robots. Each one handles a different task alone, a structure that feels startlingly familiar today. The collection also pays homage to early autonomous agent games like Robot War, where players pre-programmed warriors to battle automatically.
If you’re curious, just poke around the collection directly on Internet Archive’s site right now. It doesn’t require any downloads or setup. Everything runs through in-browser emulation. It’s a genuinely fun way to trace how today’s AI conversations started decades before they got complicated, and well worth losing an afternoon to.
