Mind Media Review

As a writing enthusiast,, I got one of the early PC's and whenever I went to a psychology conference, I would eagerly snap up software that had been custom developed for psychology. The early software wasn't much to look at, even if you had CGA. But I began a collection of software and even some hardware. One item, called RelaxU was actually a very good biofeedback headband which connected through the printer port and had a good program with it. And of course there was good old Mindprober and Mindmirror and Communication Edge and the other great old titles from Human Edge.

Then, nearing completion of my Ph.D and my entry into the crowded job market and I had a stroke of inspiration. Why not start a catalog of all of these mind software and hardware items. So, in April 1988, I sold all my stocks and took my life savings and started Mindware. The first catalog has the familiar head with rainbow you see on our home page these days.We printed 5,000 of the first edition and 100,000 of catalog number 2.

Well the software kept getting better and our circulation skyrocketed so by the middle of 1993, we were mailed a half million catalogs in a month. That's a lot of trees and a lot of postage.

We shipped a lot of software and made a lot of people's lives better. But the cost of paper and printing and postage kept soaring. And the prices of the software wasn't consistent with the cheaper prices found in retail stores and discount catalogs like MicroWarehouse.

So we decided to make some changes. First we licensed our best selling software titles and sent out letters on plain old uncoated paper with just two colors instead of fancy four-color catalog on coated stock, with an offer you couldn't turn down. We offered our best sellers for $99 or $15 each. The response was overwhelming. We had converted from a software reseller to the primer publisher of self-improvement, brain-boosting, creativity enhancing software with the brand name Mind Media's Mental Edge.

The second move was taking advantage of the booming technology of the Internet. We have moved our entire catalog on-line, something we had dreamed of long ago. But four years ago, it cost $10,000 a month to be on Prodigy and now we could be on the Internet for a fraction of the cost. We could start offering things like free technical support online, links to other psychology, creativity and self-help sites, free software downloads to try before you buy. And of course, the online newsletter you are reading.

What about the future? Well Mind Media keeps getting better. We'll be adding a CD-ROM catalog of multimedia self-help titles and offering you our new Inneractive line of Software/Biofeeedback systems.. The software we offer now and what we have planned for you certainly is a giant leap from the good old days when I first started Mindware and mailed my bunch of catalogs way back when.

The Program that Convinced a Panel of Judges it Was Human--PC Therapist

"I thought the whimsical program was a human because I was at ease with it and it made me laugh" said one of the judges, 22-year old Martha Gruppe"

David Stipp
The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1991

"After a few sessions, the PC Therapist gets to know you quite well. Type in anything...your most intimate secrets, desires, wants, emotions...or vent your anger and hostility. The Therapist always responds with a cool, calm and often humorous reply. For the first time, you can have a long satisfying conversation with your PC."

Covox Newsletter

PC Therapist IV is the first software program to fool of panel of people into believe they were talking with a walking, talking human being. John Markoff in the November er 9, 1991 New York Times reports, "A group of human judges chosen to represent the Boston man-in-the-street engaged in a three hour battle of wits with a handful of computer programs today. The idea was to answer what many scientists believe will become the central question of the information age: can machines think?"

"The tournament was the first attempt to run the Turing Test, the experiment first proposed by British mathematician Alan M. Turing 41 years ago as a simple way of cutting through the philosophical debate about whether a machine could ever be built to mimic the human mind. If a person communicating with such a machine could not tell whether it was a computer of human, Mr. Turing reasoned, the question would be resolved."

"First prize went to a commercial software program called PC Therapist IV, which was designed to engage the questioner in a whimsical conversation. The program was written by Joseph Weintraub, the president of Thinking Software Inc., a small artificial intelligence software company in Woodside, Queens." Mindware is proud to be able to bring you two versions of this award winning program.--PC Therapist IV and the new Windows version PC Therapist V.

PC Therapist IV is made up of seven modules and learns everything that is said to it, so its conversational ability is always increasing. A special feature of the program is that your entire conversation with it is stored in a file. This makes the program extremely useful for writers, reporters and students. When you find you have writer's block on a particular topic, just chat with the PC Therapist about it for an hour. Then export the resultant ASCII file into a word processor and start editing.

PC Therapist IV uses the basic PC Therapist "engine" and a cute Talking Head and Voice Synthesis through the PC Speaker A lot of fun for youngsters and a great way to enliven any party. PC Therapist IV can also be used as a learning aid. Simply type in 50 or 100 sentences about a topic and the next time the program is used, it will be a suitable teacher on that new topic.

Now you can begin use the technology that won the Turing Test on your personal computer. Order PC Therapist today and watch your computer start talking back to you .