That’s one thirsty bot

Hey Chatbots! Meet Your Great Grandfather, the Milk Mystic 🤖

25 years ago, the Milk Mystic was dropping milk-related knowledge on the web. I just brought it back to life.

The original Milk Mystic chat interface. 1996 web design at its finest.

TL;DR: 🤖💻 👉 I have resurrected the Milk Mystic, and you can experience it exactly as it was in 1996. Go ahead, check it out!

Back in 1996 I was working as an “application developer” (what software engineers were called back then) at Poppe Tyson, one of the first global interactive agencies. At the time, I was messing around with command-line conversation programs such as Eliza, which used natural language processing to maintain a dialog with humans and I thought, “why hasn’t anyone put a chatbot on the web?” (I had wanted to pitch the idea of a chatbot to a client so that I would get paid for working on something that I would have done as a personal side project anyway. :)

Original “Milk Mustache?” website from 1996. It had Flash navigation! Image maps!

While brainstorming ideas to pitch to the “Milk Mustache” folks for their new website, I proposed creating a milk-themed chatbot… that loooved to talk about milk. Our creative team dubbed it the “Milk Mystic.” We won the business, and the Milk Mystic was included as part of the launch of the first “Milk Mustache” website.

The Milk Mystic really likes to talk about milk!

Fast forward 25 years later and chatbots are all the rage. While going through some old CD-ROM backups from old workstations (which were in turn backed up from floppy diskettes), lo and behold I found the original Milk Mystic source code!

(sorry, email address no longer in use :)

While I was happy to see the code would compile without too many problems, I had to port the original front-end to Node.js so I could deploy it to Heroku without having to mess around with web server cgi configurations.

Milk Mystic’s conversation log files

The bot would maintain a log of every conversation it had, and I remember colleagues huddling around my computer each morning to review the newest chat transcripts. We’d then work on adding or tweaking responses for questions it had trouble answering. In addition to tons of profanity (for some reason people’s first instinct is to try to insult a chatbot), we’d come across the occasional romantic overture or marriage proposal.

The Milk Mystic was quite the snarky one!

We also included a whole bunch of “Easter eggs.” :)

In addition to receiving a lot of high-profile attention (given the novelty of a chatbot in 1996) it even got featured/mocked on the homepage of Suck.com (one of the most-trafficked content sites on the web at the time):

Suck’s exchange with a very early version of the Milk Mystic. The conversations eventually got much better!

And future chatbots would often include a hat tip to the good ol’ Mystic:

Anyway, it’s pretty cool to see the Milk Mystic spring back to life after nearly 25 years of hibernation! Shh, nobody tell it that I’m not…, um, it’s not 24 anymore 😉

🤖💻 👉 I have resurrected the Milk Mystic, and you can experience it exactly as it was in 1996. Go ahead, check it out!

While it’s always fun taking a trip down memory lane, I am as excited about technology, data-driven personal-optimization, and building cool stuff now as I was back then. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter!

👇 Enjoy the article? Click the 👋 below to recommend it to other interested readers! 👇