Racter was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. the being of the program was revealed around a book known as ''A Police officer's Beard is Half Constructed'', which was allegedly composed completely per program. Based on data from Chamberlain's introductiin to the book, the program apparently ran on a CP/M machine; it was written in "compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM." This version, a program that allegedly wrote the book, was non freed to the general public.

Even so, inside 1984 Mindscape, Inc. released an interactive version of Racter for DOS and Apple II computers. A promulgated Racter was the chatterbot. A BASIC program that was freed by Mindscape was far less sophisticated than anything that stand written a fairly sophisticated prose of ''The Police officer's Beard. A commercial version of Racter was fundamentally the computerised version of Mad Libs, the back where that you fill in the blanks beforehand and so plug the two into the text template to produce the surrealistic tale. A commercial program attempted to parse text inputs, identifying important nouns and verbs, which it would then regurgitate, mixed by having random inputs, to produce "conversations." A outputs were from time to time amusing, however would never pass a Turing test.

By counterpoint, a text in The Officer's Beard, in case generated per Racter'' program a least bit, would use at times been the product of Chamberlain's have specialised guide, none of which were involved in the commercial release of the program. Unluckily, a text in ''The Police officer's Beard'' seems instead to keep around been a function of Chamberlain's redaction or even have imagination.