sounds like the fun sort of things you used to be taught the basics of in the BBC and Acorn Electron users manuals and definatly in my "Start programming with the Electron!" book
They were little programs where the user would type input and the program would look for anything it reconised and reply accordingly.
Like most would start something like
10 input a$
20 IF a$ = "hi" then Print "Hello human! Whats your name?"
then you would check input and store the name etc. The examples were always basic but they were good programs to understand a little bit about variables, conditions and input/output on those old machines - and with alot of work (checking for multiple words, noting punctuation etc and ALOT of error checking) they could actually become quite adept chat AI's after a while, me and a friend spent a month on ours and then had our other friends come over and would be like look! we have created the super AI, my electron is ALIVE!
hehe, good days XD Think i still have that on tape around here somewhere >>
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