Many people think Alan Turing is the father of Informatics
because this English mathematician proposed the model in which
almost every digital computer is based (they're all Turing
machines). In the 50's, Turing proposed a test to find out
whether a computer was intelligent: make a human talk to several
"people", if the human can't tell whether she's talking to a
human or a machine then the computer is intelligent (or at least
silly in a convincingly human way). In the 60's, several
programs were written so they could interact with a human
through a screen and a keyboard (a chat, basically), one of the
most popular implementations was Eliza which played the role of
a psychologist asking you questions, although it was a very
simple program (in fact, it didn't have any intelligence
-artificial or natural- whatsoever), it was very good at
deceiving people at least during the first interactions. Fast
forward to 2006: most people chat like crazy with other people
through Instant Messenger, what almost nobody knows