[TUHS] Who came up with the spell check pipeline?

[Nikos Vasilakis via TUHS]

El mié, 3 sept 2025 a la(s) 3:57 a.m., Jonathan Gray via TUHS
(tuhs at tuhs.org) escribió:
>
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2025 at 10:39:52AM +0300, Diomidis Spinellis via TUHS wrote:
> > In Brian Kernighan's amazing VCF talk that Arnold Robbins shared yesterday,
> > bwk mentions that Steve N[uancen?] came up with the famous spell checking
> > pipeline: cat | tr | sort | uniq | comm
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg&t=1396s
> >
> > Anybody knows the correct name of that person?  ChatGPT only hallucinates
> > many wrong ones.
>
> "The spell script originated with Steve Johnson."
> From page 149 of Brian's book, UNIX: A History and a Memoir.
> An example script is on page 150.

Also: "Steve Johnson wrote the first version of the spell in an
afternoon in 1975." from an older reference, Jon Bentley's
"Programming Pearls: A spelling Checker" (CACM, May 1st, 1985), which
offers additional analysis of this program (and is openly accessible):
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532.315102

N.