How Unix spell ran in 64 kB of RAM

Software Development, Algorithms & Data Structures(blog.codingconfessions.com)view on HackerNews

unixspell checkerbloom filtercompressionhash codesgolomb code

Author: donw

Date: 7/27/2026

Article Summary:

The story of how Douglas McIlroy implemented a spell checker for Unix in the 1970s with a dictionary of 25,000 words in just 64kB of RAM, using clever data structures and compression techniques.