# I put ELIZA in my Omarchy bar

> The 1966 program that started it all, running live from the Omarchy bar in two eras, a CTSS teletype and a 1985 Macintosh. Plus the time I showed her to Douglas Adams.

Victor Hong · 9 October 2026 · https://vichong.com/blog/omarchy-eliza/

We are right in the middle of it. Agents writing code, agents running workflows, models I talk to all day that would have read as science fiction a few years ago. And my desktop has caught up too. I run [Omarchy](https://omarchy.org), and with [DHH](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYFGCESmikA) leaning hard into agentic software, it's starting to feel less like a Linux setup and more like an agentic OS: LLMs wired into the bar, the terminal, the whole way I work.

Sitting in all of that, I kept thinking about where it started. Not for the industry, for me. The earliest profound AI-like experience I ever had wasn't a frontier model. It was ELIZA, the 1966 program that started it all.

So this one is an homage. To the matriarch!

## A PalmPilot and Douglas Adams

In 1999 I ran out of a Douglas Adams talk to get something from my car.

He was in Sydney, speaking at the Australian Technology Park. Most of the room knew him as the author of *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, but he was just as much a technology visionary. Part of the way through he brought up ELIZA, the 1966 program that gives you the illusion of talking to a mind.

She was in my car. I had a Palm III then, and ELIZA lived on it.

When the talk ended and people lined up to meet him, I bolted out, grabbed that PalmPilot and came back to show him. This was the dawn of handheld computing, and he seemed to have no idea ELIZA had been ported to a handheld. Now the program he had just been talking about was sitting in his hand. He was amazed.

I knew the feeling. Before the Palm she was a DOS program on my PC. Before that, on an Apple Mac in the 80s, she was the first thing that ever felt like AI to me. I was a kid, and for the first few exchanges I was sure there was something intelligent in there.

These days I run Omarchy next to frontier and open-weight models that do things that kid would not have believed. ELIZA never understood a word anyone typed. She is still the matriarch of them all, and I am still amazed.

So I put her in Omarchy.

## Two eras, two engines

Click the mark in the bar and ELIZA drops down over whatever you're doing, with a toggle between two eras.

![ELIZA open from the Omarchy bar on a full desktop, 1966 era](https://vichong.com/_astro/screenshot-1966.BQdWcurR_2tST80.webp)

![Close-up of the 1966 era: the DOCTOR script on a green phosphor screen](https://vichong.com/_astro/closeup-1966.CUrj57Dn_OKHGA.webp)

**1966, CTSS teletype.** Green phosphor, a CTSS-style login, and the DOCTOR script exactly as printed in the appendix of Weizenbaum's January 1966 paper in *Communications of the ACM*. The engine is Anthony Hay's JavaScript recreation of the original, which reproduces Weizenbaum's program faithfully, bugs included.

![Close-up of the 1985 era: Charles Hayden's Macintosh Eliza window](https://vichong.com/_astro/closeup-1985.gNMfa9Bx_1GikeH.webp)

**1985, Macintosh.** This is the one I met as a kid. It's a port of Charles Hayden's Macintosh ELIZA engine, running the script from Eliza 1.3 for Macintosh, dated 1 August 1985, in a Chicago-font window.

Both eras replay the conversation printed in Weizenbaum's 1966 paper. Only the patient's lines are stored. ELIZA's replies are produced live, each by its own era's engine.

## Install

```bash
omarchy plugin add https://github.com/vichong/omarchy-eliza
omarchy plugin enable io.github.vichong.eliza
```

Source, credits and licences are on [GitHub](https://github.com/vichong/omarchy-eliza). The plugin's own code is MIT. The engines, scripts and fonts keep their own terms.

## Credit where it's due

None of this exists without Joseph Weizenbaum, whose estate released the original source under CC0 in 2021. Thanks also to Anthony and Max Hay for the [JavaScript engine](https://github.com/anthay/ELIZA), [Charles Hayden](http://www.chayden.net/eliza/Eliza.html) for the Macintosh version, and the [ELIZA Archaeology Project](https://findingeliza.org/) for digging all of this back up.

The first chatbot belongs in the bar of an agentic OS. Say hello to her for me.