home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Software Vault: The Gold Collection
/
Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO
/
cdr25
/
isp3009b.zip
/
CONTRIBS
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-03-04
|
7KB
|
211 lines
Ispell has a long and convoluted history. The following background
information on spelling checkers in general, and ispell in particular,
was provided to me by Les Earnest (les@dec-lite.stanford.edu):
> The earliest spelling checker (of sorts) of which I am aware was in a
> program that attempted to automatically receive human-keyed morse
> code, which can be ambiguous because of the variable timing between
> dots, dashes, intercharacter pauses, and interword pauses. This
> program didn't use a full dictionary; instead, used a table of
> digraphs (two-letter sequences) that occur in English and barred
> improper letter sequences. This program was written by someone at MIT
> Lincoln Lab around 1959 and, I think, ran on the TX-2 computer there.
> Unfortunately, I don't remember his name. I might still have the
> paper he wrote in my files but it would take a major search to find it
> and I might not succeed.
>
> A program that I wrote in 1961 to read cursive writing contained a
> real spelling checker, using the 10,000 most common English words.
> It is reported in:
> L. Earnest, "Machine Recognition of Cursive Writing," Information
> Processing 62, (Proc. IFIP Congress 1962, Munich), North-Holland,
> Amsterdam, 1963.
> and
> N. Lindgren, ``Machine Recognition of Human Language, Part III -
> Cursive Script Recognition'', IEEE Spectrum, May 1965.
>
> I brought that dictionary to Stanford and got a PhD student to write
> a spelling checker for text in Lisp running on our PDP-6 computer at
> the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab around 1967.
> Unfortunately, I do not remember which student it was; it could have
> been Gil Falk. It was a rather simple program (certainly much
> simpler than the earlier cursive writing program) and I didn't think
> of it as a significant development at the time.
>
> [Later], I got another PhD student, Ralph Gorin, to do a better and
> faster spelling checker sometime in the early '70s, still using my
> old dictionary. Ralph later wrote an article about it in CACM. I
> believe that he later augmented the dictionary.
[note: Ralph has since informed me that he wrote no such article. The
program was called SPELL and was written in 1971. Ralph provided me
with a reference to "Computer Programs for Spelling Correction", by
James L. Peterson, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1980, No. 96 in the series
"Lecture Notes in Computer Science." This book states that Ralph's
SPELL program, which is the direct ancestor of ispell, was the first
computer program written for checking the spelling of text documents.
The book is also a good source of references on spelling programs.]
> ...
>
> [Ispell] was originally written in PDP-10 assemby language and ran
> under the WAITS operating system, which is similar to TOPS-10 but existed
> only on SAIL (a dual processor KA10/PDP-6 system). It was and is called
> SPELL on that machine. It later was modified to run under Tenex and
> TOPS-20.
[Ralph mentions that SPELL was also ported to MIT's ITS and TOPS-10.]
The Tenex version of ispell was later revised by W. E. Matson (1974),
and W. B. Ackerman (1978).
In 1983, Pace Willisson (pace@prep.ai.mit.edu) converted this version to
the C language and modified it to work under Unix.
In 1987, Walt Buehring revised and enhanced ispell, and posted it to the
Usenet along with a dictionary. In addition, Walt wrote the first version
of "ispell.el", the emacs interface.
Geoff Kuenning (geoff@ITcorp.com, that's me, and by the way I pronounce it
"Kenning") picked up this version, fixed some bugs, and added further
enhancements. In 1988 I got ambitious and rewrote major portions of
the code, resulting in the table-driven multi-lingual version. Ole
Bjoern Hessen (obh@ifi.uio.no) in Norway alpha-tested this version and
provided several important enhancements.
Bob Devine (vianet!devine) provided two larger dictionaries (which
became the basis for english.1 and english.2) to Geoff for inclusion
with this posting.
Ashwin Ram (ram@@cs.yale.edu) made substantial enhancements to Walt
Buehring's emacs interface, and provided them to Geoff for inclusion
with this posting. The emacs interface was then completely overhauled
by Ken Stevens (stevens@@hplabs.hp.com), who also beta-tested the
software and without whom this posting would not have been possible.
Luis Solter ported ispell to the Amiga. Unfortunately, I was not able
to pick up 100% of his changes, especially those made to shell scripts.
Many other enhancements and bug fixes were provided by the numerous people
listed below. Do not assume, because I omit mention of their specific
contributions, that these persons were any less instrumental in creating
the version of ispell that you see before you. Every one of them made
a significant contribution, and it is only a lack of space that prevents
me from detailing these contributions. The version of ispell that you
see before you is truly a cooperative effort, and it would not exist
without the help of the generous souls listed above and below.
A full list of contributors, including those mentioned above, follows. (I
think I have listed everyone, but if you contributed and aren't listed,
let me know and I'll correct it):
W. B. Ackerman
Rohit Aggarwal
Boris Aronov
Michael C. B. Ashley
Bertil Askelid
Isaac Balbin
Tony Bennett
Peter A. Bigot
Benno Blumenthal
Peter Bruells
Ferd Brundick
Jack Bryans
Walt Buehring
Richard Caley
Keith Cantrell
John Capo
Bill Carpenter
Stewart Clamen
Henri Cohen
Damian Cugley
Ian Dall
Kevin Dalley
Neal Dalton
Mark Davies
Bob Devine
Steve Dum
Jiri Dvorak
Les Earnest
George Ferguson
John Fitch
Peter Flatau
Ralph. E. Gorin
Michael A. Guravage
Chris Hadley
John Heidemann
Ole Bjoern Hessen
imt3b2!imtsft (true name unknown)
Lester Ingber
John Jendro
Bob Jewett
Gary Johnson
Gjalt de Jong
Don Kark
Dan Karron
Steve Kelem
Masahiro Kitagawa
Jim Knutson
Fred Korz
Sebastian Kremer
Geoff Kuenning
Markus Lautenbacher
Doug Lind
Michael N. Lipp
Ernst Lippe
John Lu
Dean Luick
Evan Marcus
Dave Mason
W. E. Matson
Rob McMahon
Bob McQueer
Hal Miller
N.O. Monaghan
Peter Mutsaers
Gaute Nessan
David Neves
Mike Ogush
Thorstein Ohl
Joe Orost
Israel Pinkas
Paul Placeway
Gary Puckering
Philippe Queinnec
Bill Randle
Marc Ries
Ashwin Ram
Loren J. Rittle
Bruno Salvy
Rich Salz
Bart Schaefer
Greg Schaffer
David Shepherd
Joel Shprentz
Guy Shaw
Tom Shott
George M. Sipe
David M. Smith
Perry Smith
Luis Soltero
Ken Stevens
Andreas Stolcke
Thos Sumner
Bob Sutterfield
Stefan Taxhet
Marc Ullman
Arjan de Vet
Andrew Vignaux
Michael Wester
Johan Widen
Fredrik Wilhelmsen
Pace Willisson
Joerg Winckler
Bill Wohler
Michael J. Wolski
James Woods
Ken Yap
Jamie Zawinski
Christos S. Zoulas