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by zabzonk 2513 days ago
There were not too many spell-checkers around in 1974.
3 comments

Given the dents for punctuation I'm thinking it was done on a manual typewriter, which its very hard to integrate with a spellchecker. :)
;) Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to develop a "manual" typewriter that warns the user that they are about to make a spelling mistake, possibly keeping the whole word in a buffer until they handle the warning. The warning itself can be performed via any means, including but not limited to an electrical zap.
At some point there used to be electric typewriters with a 1 or 2 line buffer that they'd show on a black and white LCD. I don't know whether they had a spellchecker, but it wouldn't be hard to add one.
Except, you'd need ~50KB of ROM to store an English dictionary. This figure comes from the original UNIX spell program, which employed advanced compression techniques to fit into a 64KB memory footprint: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1095395
They were definitely available in the early eighties: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/23/business/typewriters-of-e...
It would if they didn't have sufficient compute, RAM, ROM.

Something that can buffer and edit 2 lines (~160 byte, and not necessarily 8-bit ones either) does not necessarily want to add hundreds of kilobytes of dictionary and the code to look things up in it.

There were electronic typewriters with spell and grammar checking.
You were the spell checker, and had to get out the correction tape.
Also: even if you noticed your printout trip have a typo, you were more likely to go "ah feckitt" due to the hassle of getting a new one.
You could correct errors using correction tape: basically pressed dry white-out atop the letter, assuming you lined it up correctly and pressed the same letter - you then type the correct letter. Of course for an important document like a resume you may want to retype the whole thing.

Also it wasn’t really a “printout” since you saw each letter as you typed it.