Embedded Files
Walt Bilofsky
In the early 1980s, Toolworks software was sold in 6 by 9 inch Ziploc bags. This cover was wrapped around the ELIZA manual with the floppy disk visible through the back of the bag.
ELIZA was responsible for Les Crane's introduction to the Toolworks. He licensed ELIZA to include in Software Golden Oldies, then later merged his company into Toolworks and became Chairman.
Walt Bilofsky with original Toolworks Heathkit H89 computer, June 1982
"Full ELIZA for your Micro" Advert for Steve Grumette's ELIZA version.
16 Jan 2025, Walt Bilofsky, Guest Post.
ELIZA played a key role in the journey of the pioneering software publishing company The Software Toolworks from a one-man shop in a converted garage to a publicly traded company with over 600 employees. Here’s how it went.
I started the Toolworks in February 1980, selling software on 5 ¼” floppy disks for the Heathkit H89 computer. By the end of the year there were 13 titles by myself and five other authors, and an employee.
Around a year later, I saw an ad for ELIZA and tracked down the publisher, Artificial Intelligence Research Group. This was actually a fellow named Steve Grumette, who agreed to license his program to the Toolworks. After working for a week to try to make it run on Heath’s BASIC interpreter, I realized it would be easier to just write it from scratch in C.
I phoned Joe Weizenbaum, whom I knew from my graduate student years at MIT, to find out how to license ELIZA. It had been published as part of his January 1966 article in the Communications of the ACM, so they owned the copyright. For $75 they sold me full rights to reproduce the article. (Back in those days, computers filled rooms and cost millions but software was given away.)
All I had wanted from ACM was the right to reproduce ELIZA's DOCTOR script, but why waste anything? So the entire article was included as an appendix to the program’s manual, to lend it gravitas and maybe teach someone something. The manual also contained instructions for the user to change and extend the script if they wished.
The Toolworks never wound up using Grumette’s program, but having agreed to license it I thought it only fair to pay him a royalty, which we did for some years. Since my C version of ELIZA could be sold for other computers, we went into competition with him, but the royalty cushioned the blow.
In 1984 Les Crane, who had a Grammy and a career as a TV talk show host, decided presciently that software was going to be the next show business. After publishing a software version of the I Ching, he decided that his next product would be Software Golden Oldies, Vol. 1. (There never was a Vol. 2.)
He licensed versions of Pong and Life, and then approached Steve Grumette about ELIZA. Steve knew that his version wouldn’t port easily, and we had dealt fairly with him, so he sent Les to us. We licensed Les our version of ELIZA, along with The Original Adventure, the only version to pay anything to Adventure’s creators, Will Crowther and Don Woods.
So Software Golden Oldies Vol. 1 was published. It became the product that Electronic Arts chose to kick off its Affiliate Label Program. It sold over 100,000 copies and laid the foundation for the 1986 merger of Les’s company into The Software Toolworks.
ELIZA also influenced the mega-hit program Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. It was written by a three person team; my task was the user interface. Joe Weizenbaum’s ELIZA had taught me that if the software reflects the user’s input back to them in a conversational way, they will perceive a presence that transcends ordinary computer interactions. Today, when we talk with our phones and appliances, the threshold for that perception is quite high. But in the 1980s a conversational text interchange was striking.
Although the user didn't converse with Mavis 1.0, she used conversational language to make observations and suggestions based on the user's typing ability, speed, errors – even suggesting that the user might be getting tired if their error rate increased. This contributed to the perception of a real person inside that made Mavis such a success. Her smash debut was an enthusiastic review by Peter Lewis in the New York Times (November 17, 1987) in which he refers to the program throughout as “Mavis” and “she.”
Lifted by sales of Chessmaster and Mavis, the Toolworks went public in 1988. Under the leadership of Les as Chairman and Joe Abrams, our Vice President and Co-Founder, it grew to over $150 million in revenue and was acquired in 1994 by the British conglomerate Pearson plc.
ELIZA, I owe you a big thank you for helping bring that about.
YOU'RE NOT REALLY TALKING ABOUT ME, ARE YOU?
Blogpost by Walt Bilofsky, Founder of The Software Toolworks, https://www.toolworks.com/bilofsky/index.html
Digital Images courtesy of Walt Bilofsky.
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