Racter

Racter is one of the more unusual pieces of software from the early home-computer era: an experimental text-generation program designed to produce apparently original prose. Rather than being a conventional word processor or writing tool, it generates sentences according to its own rules, producing strange combinations of words that can range from amusing to downright surreal. In retrospect, it is particularly fascinating because it resembles a very primitive ancestor of modern generative language software. Of course, Racter is not secretly running a gigantic neural network in the background. Its output comes from rules, vocabulary, and programmed combinations, which makes the occasional coherent sentence all the more entertaining. The results can be wonderfully odd, and sometimes seem as though a computer has spent too long reading philosophy while suffering from sleep deprivation. For anyone interested in the history of artificial language, Racter is a genuinely quirky little milestone.