Re: WordCheck app, circa 1980

Interesting story, thanks for sharing.
Has a copy of the program/ROM survived the years?

On 4/01/2019 12:25 am, saipan59 wrote:
> 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/
>
>