Racter (1984)

ubu.com

34 points·buescher··10 comments

A relative had a Mac running Racter back in the day. I was a child but I played with it quite a bit. I found it magical. I thought I was looking at ChatGPT, but obviously it was a trick. A few years later I realized that Racter wasn't that good, but I've always wanted a "Racter that actually works"... It was a long wait, but we got it for better or worse!

fun fact, there was a shareware clone of Racter released in 1991, called Claude

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas...

There's no way the connection isn't intentional!

I could easily see Anthropic picking it independently, Claude Shannon studied entropy of human text and measured the loss a human could achieve in predicting the next character of text given preceding context.

Ah yes, now that you point it out that sounds reasonable.

They missed a trick with their typeface, which could have made another nomative connection. Maybe Garamond just isn't web-safe enough.

Constructing the Other Half of The Policeman’s Beard (2021)

https://electronicbookreview.com/publications/constructing-t...

I wanted this so badly on my Amiga. I didn’t understand how limited it was, and fully expected conversational computing to be right around the corner.

I've never heard of this before. This is wild. More here: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3351

And that book is (naturally enough) borrowable on archive.org. :)

https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse/page/n2...

I first learned of it in Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas, I think.

You can run it here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Racter_1984

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