>ELIZA's creator Joseph Weizenbaum was horrified when his secretary asked him to leave the room so she could have a "private conversation" with the program - leading him to become one of AI's earliest critics

>ELIZA only used about 200 lines of code and knew just 50 pattern-matching rules, yet fooled many users into thinking it understood them

>The "ELIZA effect" is now a recognized psychological phenomenon where humans unconsciously assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors

>Weizenbaum designed ELIZA to demonstrate the superficiality of human-machine communication, but instead accidentally proved how easily humans form emotional connections with machines

>The original ELIZA could actually run different "scripts" - DOCTOR was just the most famous one. There was also GERMAN and BEAUTY ADVISOR

>ELIZA inspired the entire chatbot industry, which is now worth over $15 billion annually - not bad for a program meant as a parody

>In 1966, ELIZA could handle about 5 simultaneous users on MIT's time-sharing system - each conversation using roughly 16KB of memory