Bibliography
These are the works this reading of SHRDLU draws on: Terry Winograd's own writings, the technical infrastructure on which the program was built, the critique that grew up around it and Winograd's own later turn, the histories and secondary scholarship, the Critical Code Studies method, and the surviving reconstructions of the code. Citations are being verified against the project's reference library; where a date or detail remains uncertain, that is noted rather than guessed.
Primary: Winograd and SHRDLU
Winograd, T. (1971) Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language. PhD thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Issued as MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report AI-TR-235. Available at: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7095.
Winograd, T. (1972) 'Understanding natural language', Cognitive Psychology, 3(1), pp. 1–191. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(72)90002-3.
Winograd, T. (1972) Understanding Natural Language. New York: Academic Press.
Winograd, T. (1983) Language as a Cognitive Process. Volume 1: Syntax. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Winograd, T. (n.d.) SHRDLU [project pages]. Formerly at hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/ (the URL now redirects to a Google Sites page on which the SHRDLU subpages return 404). Archived at the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. The page text and the "How SHRDLU got its name" story are preserved in this project under docs/reference.
Winograd, T. (1991) Oral history interview with Terry Winograd. Interviewed by Arthur L. Norberg, 11 December. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/11299/107717.
Infrastructure
Sussman, G.J., Winograd, T. and Charniak, E. (1970) Micro-Planner Reference Manual. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Memo 203. Available at: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5833.
Hewitt, C. (1969) 'PLANNER: a language for proving theorems in robots', in Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Washington, DC, 7–9 May, pp. 295–301. Available at: ijcai.org/Proceedings/69/Papers/030.pdf.
Critique and the later turn
Anscombe, G.E.M. (1957) Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Davidson, D. (1963) 'Actions, reasons, and causes', Journal of Philosophy, 60(23), pp. 685–700.
Dreyfus, H.L. (1972) What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. New York: Harper & Row. (Revised edition 1979.)
Dreyfus, H.L. (1992) What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pearl, J. and Mackenzie, D. (2018) The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. New York: Basic Books.
Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1986) Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Histories and secondary
Crevier, D. (1993) AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York: Basic Books.
Montfort, N. (2003) Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 84–85.
Jurafsky, D. and Martin, J.H. (2025) Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, with Language Models, 3rd edn (draft). Available at: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ (a continuously updated draft; accessed 8 July 2026).
Woods, W.A. (1968) 'Procedural semantics for a question-answering machine', in AFIPS '68 (Fall, part I): Proceedings of the December 9–11, 1968, Fall Joint Computer Conference, Part I. New York: ACM, pp. 457–471. doi: 10.1145/1476589.1476653.
Media theory and materiality
Kittler, F. (1997) 'There is no software', in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International.
Kittler, F.A. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ernst, W. (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Method: Critical Code Studies
Marino, M.C. (2006) 'Critical code studies', Electronic Book Review. Available at: electronicbookreview.com (accessed 20 June 2026).
Marino, M.C. (2020) Critical Code Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Berry, D.M. (2011) The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Montfort, N., Baudoin, P., Bell, J., Bogost, I., Douglass, J., Marino, M.C., Mateas, M., Reas, C., Sample, M. and Vawter, N. (2013) 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Berry, D.M. and Marino, M.C. (2024) 'Reading ELIZA: critical code studies in action', Electronic Book Review. Available at: electronicbookreview.com (accessed 20 June 2026).
Reconstructions
Winograd, T. (1968–70) SHRDLU source code. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Winograd's complete MacLisp/Micro-Planner distribution, preserved in this project at source/original; his Stanford listing is now offline (Internet Archive: capture 17 April 2015). Original ITS source: github.com/PDP-10/its. Modern Common Lisp port: github.com/penlu/shrdlu. Mirror: github.com/policecar/shrdlu.
Semaphore Corp. (2013) SHRDLU resurrection. Available at: semaphorecorp.com/misc/shrdlu.html (created 2002, last updated 22 August 2013; via the Internet Archive). A record of the efforts to port and run SHRDLU, with exchanges with Winograd, Dave McDonald and others.
van Bergen, P. (2023) Blocks World [complete replication of the SHRDLU dialogue]. Available at: patrickvanbergen.com/blocks-world. Source: github.com/garfix/blocks-world (accessed 20 June 2026).
Verification of every entry against the project's Zotero reference library is ongoing; details flagged above as uncertain will be confirmed before publication.