Yes, considering that Eliza was created in 1964 and a word given as a chatterbot instead of a chatbot as we now know it. IRC wasn’t created until 1988-89 and although it did not “Chat” per se, it enabled chatting between online users (people).
A bot is a piece of hardware that can act sometimes on its own, often pretending to be a person and sometimes doing some rather malicious damage. Spybots, spyders, crawlers, bugs of all types, searching and listening to info then often retrieving that data back to it’s home base (where ever that might be).
While it seems that there are chatterbots, chatterboxes, chatbots and a wide assortment of “bots”, we pretty much know which type appeals to us and which does not.
It’s been nice chatting about this.