Pen and Lisp and Eliza, and Creative Computing

Pen had just gote on the arpinat. John mc carthy was at stamford, and he was pushing the concept of lisp and ai pretty hard. Someone else on arpanet, berney cosell, seemed to have eliza running on a machine in the original lisp. They hooked eliza right up to the default arpinet connection. So if you tried to connect to i t s, you'd get, hello. I'm eliza. And so this idea of talking with the computer and this lisp version of eliza knocking around really got a lot of people in computer science schools excited about symbolic computing using lisp.