Jopsph Weizenbaum's ELIZA was rule-based and ran on even slower (1960s) hardware, but because it relied on simple pattern matching instead of neural nets, it would easily have been more responsive (the Emacs editor/operating system has an implementation included, start it with: M-x doctor RETURN).

ELIZA was not written in assembler, but (different versions) in COMIT, FORTRAN and LISP.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365153.365168