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

[Jonathan Gray via TUHS]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2025 at 06:03:33AM -0400, Nikos Vasilakis via TUHS wrote:
> 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.

The spell manual page from fifth edition is dated 2/26/74.

The script was not distributed with fifth or six edition as far as I can
tell.  Seventh edition has Doug's C version.