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(ispell.info)History

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Where it came from
==================

   Ispell has a long and convoluted history.  Originally called SPELL,
it was written by Ralph E. Gorin in 1971.  That version was written in
assembly language for the DEC PDP-10 to run under the WAITS operating
system at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  Subsequent
versions, also in PDP-10 assembly language, were developed for the BBN
TENEX, MIT ITS, and DEC TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 operating systems.  It was
later revised by W. E. Matson (1974), and W. B. Ackerman (1978),
changing its name to ISPELL in the process.

   In 1983, Pace Willisson (pace@ai.mit.edu) converted this version to
the C language and modified it to work under Unix.

   In 1987, Walt Buehring revised and enhanced ispell, and posted it to
the Usenet along with a dictionary.  In addition, Walt wrote the first
version of "ispell.el", the emacs interface.

   Geoff Kuenning (geoff@ITcorp.com, that's me, and by the way I
pronounce it "Kenning") picked up this version, fixed many bugs, and
added further enhancements.  In 1988 I got ambitious and rewrote major
portions of the code, resulting in the table-driven multi-lingual
version.  Ken Stevens (stevens@hplabs.hp.com) made overwhelming
contributions to the elisp support to produce the version you are using
now.

   Due to a misunderstanding involving the Free Software Foundation, it
later became necessary to rename this version to ispell to avoid
confusion on the part of users.

   Many other enhancements and bug fixes were provided by other people.
Although I omit mention here due to space, many of these people have
also made significant contributions to the version of ispell you see
here.  For a full list of people who have contributed to ispell, refer
to the file `Contributors' which is distributed with the ispell sources.

Geoff Kuenning
geoff@ITcorp.com