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It still blows my mind that when growing up I had a Commodore 64 word processor with spell check. To run the spell checker you had to hit the button to start t
by jandrese 4y ago
It still blows my mind that when growing up I had a Commodore 64 word processor with spell check. To run the spell checker you had to hit the button to start the spell checker and then turn the floppy upside down while it ran through the document.
This means you had to store in a measly 64kb not only the code for the spell checker, the entire contents of the document, KERNAL overhead, and enough data for the spell checker to run. Remember that the Commodore 64 had an incredibly slow disk drive (300bps) and the disks only supported 160kb of data. Any scheme that required a lot of disk access would be terribly slow. Yet somehow it worked and wasn't outrageously slow. I suspect the program was unloading big chunks of its own program to aggressively reuse the memory space but even then it seems like magic.
- ghaff 4y agoIt's pretty amazing between now and then. Way back when I wrote a DOS file manager that fit in 32K of assembly language. As I recall, at one point I upgraded it to use two different 64K segments when running by putting the code and in-memory information about the files in different segments.
- zimpenfish 4y agoSee also ZX Spectrum Scrabble[1] with an 11k word dictionary (and game code) in ~41kb[2], loaded from tape - no swapping / reading / etc. [1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/zxsr.php?id=4375 https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/zxsr.php?id=4375 [2] 48k - 6.75k for the screen.
- reaperducer 4y agoThere were several spell checkers for the TRS-80 model 100, which maxed out at 32K of RAM. More typically, it has 24K, because the weird RAM chips were so expensive. Plus, few people had floor drives for the 100 —you had to operate from a cassette tape.
- jgtrosh 4y agoI was going to point out my Panasonic W1030 word processor as probably even more impressive since it's not even really a PC. But then I found specs and its dictionary uses 384kB [1]. Then again it's from the latter 80s, maybe previous word processors attempted more constrained spellcheckers. [1]: https://archive.org/details/kx-w1000-service-manual/KX-W1000%20Service%20Manual_300dpi/page/n31 https://archive.org/details/kx-w1000-service-manual/KX-W1000...
- networked 4y agoWhen this was posted in 2012, an HN user described how they developed a spellchecker for the Commodore 64 as a teenager in the 1980s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4641019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4641019