The Internet Archive collects early 'thinking machine' software in a playable Vintage AI collection
by The RetroMake desk 26 October 2026
ELIZA in some twenty versions, Racter, Alter Ego and Little Computer People are among about a hundred emulated programs gathered by Jason Scott in August. Separately, the Wayback Machine's director says its defences against automated traffic have been blocking some real users.
What we know
- Jason Scott announced the Internet Archive's Vintage Artificial Intelligence collection on the Archive's blog on 16 August 2026; archive.org lists the collection as public from 12 August 2026.
- The collection held 101 items on 26 October 2026, mostly emulated software from the 1970s to the 1990s.
- Scott's post links 19 different versions of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, alongside Racter and Activision's Alter Ego and Little Computer People.
- On 15 September 2026 Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, wrote that protections against high-volume automated traffic sometimes block real people by mistake.
The Internet Archive has gathered about a hundred pieces of early software that presented a computer as something that thinks, from versions of ELIZA to Activision's Little Computer People, into a collection that visitors can run in emulation. Jason Scott announced the Vintage Artificial Intelligence collection on the Archive's blog on 16 August 2026. The collection page lists it as public from 12 August, and it held 101 items when we checked on 26 October.
What is in it
Scott describes the contents as emulated software "dating roughly from the 1970s through the 1990s", curated around "the adventure of experiencing a machine that thinks". He is blunt about the premise: "none of the programs in this collection come within a solar system of thinking in any actual sense." The collection's own description calls it software "claiming some aspect of artificial intelligence as a primary feature", including programs "intended as therapists, conversation partners, and opponents".
ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum's program whose DOCTOR script played an interested psychologist, takes up the largest share. Scott's post links 19 different versions, for machines including the Apple II, the TRS-80 Color Computer, the Palm Pilot and the Atari 800, along with programs that bent the idea: Dr. Z, which ignores what you type, Abuse, which answers with hostility, and Pisko, a parody that has to be addressed in Serbian.
Racter, short for Raconteur, gets a section of its own. Scott calls it "a very early commercial version of a chatbot" and quotes a passage of its prose. Activision supplies two titles: Alter Ego, released in male and female versions, which the post says was developed by a psychologist and takes the player through a life from childhood onwards, and Little Computer People, programmed by David Crane, in which a small person lives inside the computer with a name and moods of its own. The collection also takes in games whose characters act without the player, including Deadline, Suspended and The Hobbit, and programming games such as Robotwar, in which the player writes a robot's behaviour and sends it into an arena.
Wayback Machine access
On 15 September Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, wrote that the service "has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic" and that the Archive had put protections in place to keep it running, including a rewritten message for blocked requests, which receive HTTP error 429, "too many requests". He acknowledged the cost: "Those protections sometimes catch real people by mistake." Users who think they have been blocked in error are asked to email info@archive.org with their operating system, browser and IP address. Graham did not say who was sending the traffic.