
The Fascinating History of Autocorrect (2014) - whyleyc
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/history-of-autocorrect/
======
jasode
A related concept to "autocorrect" (fix it _after_ typing it) is "predictive
typing" (expand invisible hit zone around statistically likely onscreen key
_before_ the user presses it).

This was the clever technique that Apple programmer Ken Kocienda[1] figured
out for the 2007 iPhone to make its tiny QWERTY screen keyboard usable.

Deep link of Scott Forstall explaining it:
[https://youtu.be/xxBc1c3uAJw?t=4m55s](https://youtu.be/xxBc1c3uAJw?t=4m55s)

[1] [https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-i-invented-
autocorrect/](https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-i-invented-autocorrect/)

~~~
melling
Isn't Intellisense predictive typing?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_code_completion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_code_completion)

Does Microsoft still have the best code completion?

~~~
ebg13
> Isn't Intellisense predictive typing?

No. Intellisense tells you a list of options based on type inspection and then
optionally autocompletes from the set of options. It just says that if you
type A and then a dot, according to the grammar of the language, you then must
be about to type a member of A. But it's not predictive, because you literally
just told the system that you're about to type a member of A by typing A and
then a dot.

~~~
melling
Don't you also get predictive variable and function names? Types? Control
structures? enumerations?

The space is much more limited so you should never need to type more than a
few characters once you've written something once.

~~~
ebg13
> _Don 't you also get predictive variable and function names? Types? Control
> structures? enumerations?_

Nothing* in intellisense is predictive in any meaningful sense. It just
displays the entire set of options constrained by one or more of [the grammar,
structured object inspection, and words seen in the document].

* There is one thing, actually. Intellisense can optionally boost the priority of a suggestion based on proximity to other instances. I would classify that as prediction.

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mrguyorama
I'm not surprised that autocorrect came out of Microsoft. The best autocorrect
I have ever used was on the keyboard of the Microsoft Zune HD. If you were
even hitting the correct half of the keyboard, it would be able to solve the
puzzle and correct your typing. It is the only onscreen keyboard that even
comes close to using a physical keyboard on a phone, and I'm routinely
disappointed by Apple and Google's comparatively pathetic offerings.

~~~
j88439h84
Is that because zune is only searching among a small set of song names, not
among all possible strings like the phones do?

~~~
mrguyorama
No, I was using it for general purpose typing, for example on MSN messenger
which was available as an app on the Zune HD

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gumby
For those interested in AI: the root of autocorrect appears to lie with Warren
Titelman (also originator of things like Undo) who was a PhD student of Marvin
Minsky at the MIT AI lab. Warren invented DWIM -- Do What I Mean, like an
autocorrect for the shell, when he worked on Interlisp at PARC. Simonyi,
author of the first WYSIWYG editor, Bravo, left PARC to go to Microsoft and
re-implement Bravo as Word, incorporating a lot of other PARC ideas that were
in his head.

DWIM was a bit weird and as I was used to typing what I wanted I didn't really
like it (though strangely, macro expansion was tied into DWIM so you couldn't
disable it completely). Though it was a lisp thing (and Interlisp-D wasn't
even written using a text editor) the best way of thinking about it is if you
typed 'mr -R /' into Bash and bash suggested both that you meant "rm -r /" and
that doing so on the root would be a bad idea.

~~~
gjvc
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Teitelman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Teitelman)

[http://warrenteitelman.com/](http://warrenteitelman.com/)

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DJHenk
> Without it, we probably couldn't even have phones that look anything like
> the ingots we tickle—the whole notion of touchscreen typing, where our podgy
> physical fingers are expected to land with precision on tiny virtual keys,
> is viable only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.

This is a nice dramatic sounding intro, but it is really exaggerated. Along
the lines of "Nobody can survive without social media in the modern world". Of
course you can live without it. Stop trying to inflate a minor inconvenience
that you can get used to to "impossible".

I never had autocorrect and I recently found the option to switch of the
"suggestions" in the top bar of my phone keyboard. It is heaven. Sure, I have
to spend some time fixing my typos, but it's way faster than to fix a
completely wrong suggested word that I accidentally touched.

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JadeNB
It's a shame that the humorless 'fix' of the article's title throws away the
joke ….

