In 1966, a queue began forming at a particular door inside the MIT Project MAC complex. The queue was composed mostly, though not entirely, of young women — students, lab assistants, secretaries from neighbouring departments — who had heard there was a teletype on the other side of the door that could be talked to, and who would wait, sometimes patiently and sometimes not, for ten minutes alone with it. The professor whose office it was found this funny for about a week and disturbing for the rest of his life. The program on the other end of the teletype was about two hundred lines long. It had no learning. It had no memory across sessions. It could not parse a sentence in any sense a linguist would recognise. It searched for keywords from a fixed vocabulary, picked the highest-ranked one it found, applied a hand-written decomposition rule to extract phrase fragments, and substituted those fragments into a hand-written reply template. That was the whole program.…