10 Sep
2012
10 Sep
'12
11:21 a.m.
On Mon, 10 Sep 2012, barythrin at gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure about the one you're referring to
specifically but there
was one called jabberwock. Chatterbotcollection.com has a large list of
historical bots but I've rarely found the links to be current or alive
unfortunately. It does have a listing called jabber btw.
Anything else you recall about it? Any graphics at all? Did it like to
gossip and spread rumors (Racter). My personal favorite from the dos
days was the first Alice (dos). I'm fairly sure it was also Richard
Wallace who wrote it but am having a predictably hard time finding that
right now.
The basic patter of this program was to ingest text, mix it up, and emit
something that sounds like the original, but turned into a word salad.
Using a Shakespeare play and something from Ian Flemming as input files
would result in stuff that looks like a Shakespearean spy thriller to
varying degrees depending on how you set the input proportions.
It was all in text mode, though with some graphical characters for borders
and such. There was a large section in the middle bottom where the output
was printed. At the top were readouts of the input filenames and controls
for sentence length and proportions to be taken from each input file.
I found the webpage of "Jabberwock", which is from the right time period,
but instead emits nonsense words. The actual zipfile and source are
404-not-found.
My last resort for tracking this down appears to be a CD containing a
backup of an old BBS that went down in 1996 called DaWarren. That's where
I originally got the program.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
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A: Top-posting.
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