Changing the Game: Creating Intelligent, Conversational Interfaces

My dad got me my first computer for Christmas when I was 11 years old. It was a Texas Instruments 99-4a. He must have gotten it second hand because it had no box or any form of storage like a tape drive. I had been obsessed with the movie War Games, so my first program on the TI was designed to replicate the computer in the movie which uttered the famous line "shall we play a game." My program gave static responses to a huge variety of programmed questions, and mostly followed the script from the movie.