Software archeologists have successfully pulled 'Eliza,' the world's first chatbot from the 1960s, back from digital oblivion.

Joseph Weizenbaum published a journal article detailing ELIZA, "a program … which makes certain types of natural language conversation between man and computer possible." He had created the first chatbot and named it after Eliza Doolittle,

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.

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,