Comment by bell-cot

Ah, the Good Old Days. Back when a bit of memory cost more than most butter churns, and the ultimate data transfer technology was a sharp Express rider with his saddlebags full of punch cards...

Back in the early 1980's, I recall futzing around a bit with dictionary compression algorithms. Very interesting - but it didn't take me long to conclude that outperforming `spell` wouldn't be easy. Nor worth the effort.