The Internet Archive has launched the Vintage Artificial Intelligence collection, assembled by Jason Scott. It gathers emulated software from roughly the 1970s through the 1990s, all of it built around one theme: the experience of a machine that appears to think. Scott is explicit that none of these programs come close to actual thinking. They are portrayals of the idea, running on microcomputers and game consoles.

The anchor of the collection is Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, the script-driven conversation program whose DOCTOR persona famously convinced users it was a sympathetic therapist. The archive holds around twenty ports, spanning Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 800, PalmPilot, ZX Spectrum and more, including German variants and a Psycho Eliza. Around it cluster parodies and experiments: Dr. Z ignores everything you say, Abuse answers with hostility, Hyper Psych offers a HyperCard therapist, and Pisko requires you to converse in Serbian.

Racter, released commercially in 1985 after generating published prose like 'They have love but they also have typewriters', gets special attention as an early commercial chatbot. Scott notes that contemporary reviews pondered its ramifications with a seriousness that reads quaintly now. Activision contributed two artifacts: Alter Ego, a psychologist-designed life simulation with male and female versions, and Little Computer People, built by Pitfall! creator David Crane, which pretended tiny inhabitants lived inside your machine.

Games round out the set. Deadline, Suspended, The Hobbit and Murder on the Zinderneuf leaned on scripted characters acting off-screen; The Hobbit's programmer Veronika Megler gave NPCs enough autonomy that unwinnable states could arise without the player ever knowing. A final genre covers programming-battle games like Robot War, Worms and Fortress, where simple rules produced a convincing illusion of autonomous behavior.

The whole collection runs in the browser at archive.org/details/vintageai. The em-dash jokes are Scott's own.