For people interested in the history of technology — here’s an eccentric essay arguing that the first examples of NLP happened in medieval times. Mystics studying the Kabbala devised “sacred rules” for combining letters to generate prophetic texts and, sometimes, to create golems.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/natural-language-processing-dates-back-to-kabbalist-mystics

“While specific technologies have changed over time, the basic idea of treating language as a material that can be artificially manipulated by rule-based systems has been pursued by many people in many cultures and for many different reasons. These historical experiments reveal the promise and perils of attempting to simulate human language in non-human ways—and they hold lessons for today’s practitioners of cutting-edge NLP techniques.”