A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
15 days ago
- #programming
- #spellchecker
- #history
- In 1984, writing a spellchecker for MS-DOS required extreme memory efficiency due to limited system resources (as little as 256K).
- The UNIX dictionary was too large (2.4MB) to fit in memory, necessitating creative compression or disk-based solutions.
- Programmers developed advanced data compression and structures to handle spellchecking within tight constraints.
- Modern programming languages like Python or Perl can implement a basic spellchecker trivially with built-in hash tables.
- The contrast highlights significant progress in computing power and programming ease over decades.