About 17 years ago I put up a small website and called it “The Simon Laven Page”. It covered things called Chatterbots. They are computer programs that attempt to simulate typed conversation with the aim of at least temporarily fooling a human into thinking they were talking to another person. With a lifelong interest in Artificial Intelligence caused by KITT, HAL and Johnny 5 I was very interested by programs such as the BBS Door Shampage, the Functional Response Emulation Device FRED and the virtual psychoanalyst Eliza. In 1996 a write-up of my site in Britain’s The Observer newspaper joked that after they had downloaded ELIZA from my website they had to “rummage around in the attic to find a computer sufficiently underpowered to run it”. It was a joke at the time because it was not entirely true. Now: it is. Recently I have been receiving a huge number of emails from people who are unable to get the downloaded Chatterbots to work on their PC. This has always been the case. They are DOS programs that need to be unzipped into their own folder, run from there and in the case of BBS Doors things can get even more fiddly. The ‘new’ problem is that these DOS programs won’t work in 64-bit Windows. 64-bit Windows has of course been around for years, but as I’ve noticed this academic year when downloading these programs as part of their assignments that we’ve entered a phase where the only Windows computers available to them are 64-bit ones. This leads to the wider issue of not just Chatterbots, nor BBS Doors, but all DOS programs that can’t be easily shoved into an emulator. I have to say I’d never noticed. By chance all my other computers are Windows 7 except for my Chatterbot work which is on a battered XP. So when I started receiving these emails in the usual correlation of ‘academic-deadlines-v-emails’, I downloaded Shampage from my website onto one of my Windows 7 machines, unzipped it, tried to run shampage.exe and thought: “We’ve do have a wider issue here”. Unlike, say, Console Games, BBS Doors need to read and write to multiple files. Shampage.zip has 16 files (17 if you include a BAT file that I wrote many years ago to help people who weren’t BBS Sysops to run the program). So as far as I can tell: the only way I can talk to Shampage so is to unzip the files into a directory at the root of the C drive, run an emulator such as DOSBox, wrap the root directory as a ‘drive’ and then run Shampage from there in its isolated environment. This is not a small task. There’s a lot of DOS shareware and freeware that’s better than most current software out there. So my plan is to find a way to get Shampage to easily work on Windows 7 and then go on porting from there. Presumably this needs to be done by creating a single executable for each program I want to port which includes the original DOS programs and a DOS shell that can install and run as standalone 64-bit-compatible Chatterbot. If this doesn’t work I’m not sure how to salvage these for the future people who would want to use DOS software going forward (like the students who are asked to visit The Simon Laven Page as part of their coursework and are unable to get the programs to work). All my other alternatives don’t really fly. The source code for these original programs has gone the way of the 9,600 baud modem (and is probably polluting the same stretch of river in South Asia). Creating programs that simulate the style of the original is, although doable, a rubbish idea because of the nuances that made them good in the first place. So it does appear the only option is to get the DOS programmes of the eighties and nineties to work in a 64-bit environment easily. Not all will be keen, there’s one person who begs me to take down his DOS chatterbot from my site on the grounds that’s he thinks it’s old and rubbish and from a bygone era. I have consistently refused. [It is not one that I have mentioned in this letter]. Anyway it’s about that periodical time when the eighties come back into fashion. Simon Laven simon@simonlaven.com  http://www.simonlaven.com