"DaleW" in oups.com:
> I'd forgotten Eliza. I've had worse therapists.
>

Yes, I remember it too. There was a public display terminal at a museum
that Mark will know (LHS) in the early 1970s. People could go up to a
terminal and exchange discussion. The program often used simple mechanistic
procedures (like, you mention X and it comes back with "How does X make you
feel?") -- not so very different from some human therapists sometimes?
There was also a fictionalized version giving mental-health support to the
masses, in an avant-garde science-fiction movie around that time (THX 1138 I
think). The public Eliza demonstrations may have helped too to de-mystify
computers quite a bit, to people who tried them (apropos previous posting).

The high tide of artificial-intelligence (AI) funding and research and
glamour circa 1965-1975, and especially its penetrating critics like Hubert
Dreyfus, used to make clear that the US gov't would set up funding (one
could almost say prizes) for whoever could create a software program to do X
Y Z externally intelligent-looking things. Astute software researchers then
set about writing specialized programs that did exactly X Y Z as defined in
the challenge -- like more sophisticated Eliza programs -- and won the
prizes. (As I remember, one early program titled, grandly, "General Problem
Solver," was such a case, and that in reality it performed a mechanistic,
narrowly constrained function. This stuff brought criticism within the AI
research world. One expert wrote that if we don't clean up our act, someone
else will do it for us, and Dreyfus then wrote "I take that as my cue" for a
second edition of his book, which was titled _What Computers Still Can't
Do._ For anyone unfamiliar with the name, Hubert Dreyfus wrote about AI as
a professor of philosophy, and his brother was a professor of engineering at
the same university. The brothers looked alike, and would appear at
well-attended public debates with passionate proponents of AI in the 1970s.
I remember one of those chaired by Lofti Zadeh, that I attended as a
student -- Zadeh introduced Hubert Dreyfus with very good humor as the
"reactionary" voice on the panel -- those were meaty debates, real
substance. "AI" of this early, boom-time type went out of fashion, Stanford
AI Lab (SAIL) lost its Donald C. Power building full of DEC computers of the
_less_ familiar PDP numbers ("Programmed Data Processors," if anyone's
interested) and its self-propelled robot with TV camera on top (unique
official yellow diamond road sign nearby: "Caution! Robot Vehicle").
Usually there were graduate students at the other end of the wireless link,
watching the picture from the TV camera and guiding the robot. In the
summer, the robot could be seen some distance away hanging around near an
idyllic pond and meadow, popular for nude bathing.