Re: WordCheck app, circa 1980

Always interesting to read stories from people who were actually involved
in developing commercial software or hardware back in the day. Thanks for
sharing!

Niklas Ramsberg

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 12:43 AM Jeffrey Birt <birt_j@soigeneris.com> wrote:

> Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
>
> Jeff_Birt
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: saipan59 <saipan59@q.com>
> Sent: Thursday, January 3, 2019 10:26 AM
> To: cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
> Subject: WordCheck app, circa 1980
>
> Hi,
> I was looking through some old stuff, and it occurred to me that folks
> might possibly be interested in this. I am the author of the "WordCheck"
> app for PET/CBM, circa 1980.
> Here's the story:
>
> At the beginning of Junior year in college (1979-80) I bought my first
> computer, a Commodore PET, which ran at 1 Mhz, had 8KB of RAM, and stored
> software on cassette tapes. I bought it used for $400 from Tom Callen, who
> ran a shop called Micro Computer Industries in Ft. Collins, Colorado. I got
> to know him and his family well, and later bought other computer gear from
> him, including a KIM-1 board that I used as part of my Senior Design
> Project (I still have the KIM-1). Tom did not have a good technical
> background, rather he was a marketer/salesman, and he had a lot of ideas
> for creating and selling software apps to his customers. Since I had some
> ‘formal’
> software expertise, I helped him with various projects. The biggest
> project for me was born when Tom and I talked about how he was such a lousy
> speller, and he used a certain word processing program called ‘WordPro’,
> and wouldn’t it be great if the computer could help check his spelling? So
> it became my project in 1980. I decided that the program would need a
> ‘dictionary’ to check words against, because there is no adequate algorithm
> that could be used (many exceptions and variations to spelling rules,
> etc.). The next problem was that a useful dictionary would need thousands
> of words, and there would not be enough memory in the computer. But I
> realized that most spellings can be resolved by looking at the ‘root word’,
> then checking for various suffixes and prefixes. For example, ‘spell’,
> ‘spelled’, ‘spelling’, and ‘misspell’ all share the same root. The
> dictionary needs to contain only ‘spell’, and the possible pre/postfixes of
> ‘mis’, ‘ed’ and ‘ing’ are assumed to be correct. Other known suffixes
> included ‘s’, ‘es’, ‘ly’, etc. It’s not a perfect system, but it works in a
> large number of cases. The program would highlight unverified words
> on-screen, and allow the user to add that unknown word to its dictionary.
> So, a business user would have their clients’ personal names in the
> dictionary, so they would not be called out as errors. In the end, I
> created a standard dictionary of 2100 roots.
> Tom marketed the program under the name of ‘WordCheck’, and sold a number
> of copies of it for $200 each. Tom was concerned about software piracy, so
> a common practice then was to include an EEPROM with the program, which
> must be installed in the computer to allow the program to work. So, I wrote
> some pieces in Assembly, and we burned it into 2716 EEPROMs.
> As far as we knew, WordCheck was the very first spell-check program ever
> sold for microcomputers! We probably should have patented it… Around the
> time I graduated, my total share of the WordCheck royalties was about $1400.
> That felt like quite a lot of money, and I was very proud of the
> accomplishment!
>
> Pete
>
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://cbm-hackers.2304266.n4.nabble.com/
>
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