Comment by eichin
1 year ago
One of the things that got me intrigued by Unix was an early 1980s(ish) Byte article which walked through building a (trivial example, not the "real" one) spell checker out of a split/sort/comm pipeline, something like 7 commands? 8-bit PCs didn't have anything like that, and yet it didn't look like it needed that much sophistication...
One a similar note, there is this period video where Brian Kernighan shows how to construct a spell checker using a UNIX shell one-liner:
https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=4m56s