Charlie directly stems from the Anna project. In turn, Anna directly stems from the Program D project. Furthermore, Program D stems from work done at the ALICE Foundation.
In short, Cocoa Nuts wanted a robot to support our cocoanutstech.com domain. We felt that the Program D code would best suit our needs. Unfortunately, the Program D code had disappeared from the net and we had to snoop around to rescue it. The Anna team made their AIML code (robot logic) available but not the source code of Program D which they used. We had to decompile the Anna jar files to recreate some source code which we could modify.
Program D version 4.1.5 requires a Java 1.4 VM. Because we needed it to run on Mac OS X, which at the time only had a Java 1.3 VM, we needed to modify the code. This wasn't so hard but required some minor magic done to the source code. We are calling the current code "Charliebot v4.1.8" The current code includes some useful corrections to the Program D codebase.