My dad told me a ton of things I didn't believe while I was growing up. He died in January of 2020 at 73. I'm 35 now, with 3 boys and another on the way, doing my very best to know what's going on for myself and my dad both. Oh the conversations we'd have...

The torch has been passed.

“Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down, they are truly down.” Joseph McCarthy, US senator and communist hunter, 1950

It turns out that in the history of chatbots, Red Father exists only in the memories of a few people who played it. Neither AT&T’s corporate historian nor long-retired employees of Bell Labs knew about it, and after many calls failed to turn up information, I began to feel like I was chasing a ghost. Given Bell Labs’ history as an innovation center with researchers always playing around with new technologies, it’s likely that it was someone’s passion project, perhaps built solely for the fun of it, that never came close to having a commercial life.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2023/04/02/the-thrill---and-the-mystery---of-a-1970s-bell-labs-ai-chatbot-known-as-red-father/?sh=61e997012277

Only in the memories of a child that used Red Feather does it survive.