Source: https://www.renegadetribune.com/jewish-invention-myths-predictive-text-autocorrect/
by Karl Radl
Autocorrect… you know that allegedly useful bane of my existence which causes me innumerable problems on X and other platforms because I type out something far too quickly and then it autocorrects to some other common typo such as ‘juwish’ rather than ‘jewish’.
Well, I suppose you didn’t know that jews claim they invented that with Eric Schulmiller asserting in the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ in 2016 that:
‘Autocorrect (1972, Warren Teitelman, who devised a philosophy of computing called “Do What I Mean” (DWIM), in which computers could recognize and automatically correct obvious mistakes in programming code – and eventually in the fat-fingered mishaps of everyday human conversation).’ (1)
Interestingly it is also sometimes credited – more convincingly in my opinion – to Dean Hachamovitch – who is also jewish – (2) by David Sparshott in 2014 in ‘Wired’ when he writes:
‘When Hachamovitch first joined Microsoft, he was given a job on the Word team. This was back in the early ’90s. Word processing was at a crossroads, split into factions. On one side were the people who wanted adornments and frills – improved desktop publishing, color separation, and the like. On the other side was the functionality gang, with whom Hachamovitch threw in his lot. This camp simply wanted to help people get out of their own way. As Hachamovitch saw it, the main thing that people do on a word processor is type – and typing, in his estimation, is a matter of “a little bit of creativity and a whole lot of scutwork.” He could improve the typing experience by delivering us from scut. His aim was to make our typing sleek and invisible, smooth as speaking from a teleprompter.
The notion of autocorrect was born when Hachamovitch began thinking about a functionality that already existed in Word. Thanks to Charles Simonyi, the longtime Microsoft executive widely recognized as the father of graphical word processing, Word had a “glossary” that could be used as a sort of auto-expander. You could set up a string of words – like insert logo – which, when typed and followed by a press of the F3 button, would get replaced by a JPEG of your company’s logo. Hachamovitch realized that this glossary could be used far more aggressively to correct common mistakes. He drew up a little code that would allow you to press the left arrow and F3 at any time and immediately replace teh with the. His aha moment came when he realized that, because English words are space-delimited, the space bar itself could trigger the replacement, to make correction … automatic! Hachamovitch drew up a list of common errors, and over the next years he and his team went on to solve many of the thorniest. Seperate would automatically change to separate. Accidental cap locks would adjust immediately (making dEAR grEG into Dear Greg). One Microsoft manager dubbed them the Department of Stupid PC Tricks.’ (3)
What is the problem with these claims?
Predictive text – which is the basis of (and practically the same thing as) Autocorrect – was actually invented in the late 1940s by a Chinese inventor named Lin Yutang to deal with the problems inherent in Chinese language typewriters which had far too many symbols to have a useable series of keys and then predictive text entry – using associative clusters to offer predicted symbols – by Chinese typesetter Zhang Jiying in 1951. (4)
Further predictive text based on Yutang and Jiying’s idea(s) was actually in use in Western Europe and North America as late as 1970/1971. (5)
So clearly then Warren Teitelman and Dean Hachamovitch just adapted extant technologies to different purposes: they didn’t invent let alone popularize predictive text or autocorrect. They just applied it to different fields of work where previously it had no – or under – applied.
So, no jews didn’t invent predictive text/autocorrect: the Chinese did!
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References
(3) https://www.wired.com/2014/07/history-of-autocorrect/
(4) Jamie Fisher, 2018, ‘The Left-Handed Kid’, Vol. 40, No. 5 (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n05/jamie-fisher/the-left-handed-kid)
(5) See Sidney Smith, Nancy Goodwin, 1971, ‘Alphabetic Data Entry Via the Touch-Tone Pad: A Comment’, Human Factors, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 189-190
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