When did spellcheck and autocomplete start, and did people know a machine guessed?

"The first two mobile phones available for sale with T9 text input installed were the Benefon iO [ 9 ] in Finland and the Anycall phone by Samsung."

"It developed T9 , a predictive text input system that became the dominant text-entry method on mobile phones during the late 1990s and 2000s."

"adding a number of capabilities such as T9 predictive text ."

"T9 was used on phones from Verizon , NEC , Nokia , Samsung Electronics , Siemens , Sony Mobile , Sanyo , SAGEM and others, as well as PDAs such as the Avigo [ 3 ] during the late 1990s."

"with the software using a built-in dictionary to predict the most probable word from the sequence of key presses."

"A combination of cutting-edge features, such as internal antennas and T9 text entry , ensured the 3210's huge commercial success."

"In 1951, the Chinese typesetter Zhang Jiying arranged Chinese characters in associative clusters, a precursor of modern predictive text entry, and broke speed records by doing so."

"On a phone with a numeric keypad, each time a key (1–9) is pressed (when in a text field), the algorithm returns a guess for what letters are most likely for the keys pressed to that point."

"T9 was licensed to handset manufacturers and became one of the most widely deployed text input systems for mobile phones throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, appearing on devices from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and others."

"Predictive entry of text from a telephone keypad has been known at least since the 1970s (Smith and Goodwin, 1971)."

"While multi-tap text entry relies on explicit disambiguation to specify each letter, T9 uses implicit disambiguation in order to identify words that are a potential match for the input of letter groupings."

"The approach reduced the number of keystrokes required compared to the multi-tap method, in which users pressed a key repeatedly to cycle through letters."

"Some disambiguation systems further attempt to correct spelling, format text or perform other automatic rewrites, with the risky effect of either enhancing or frustrating user efforts to enter text."

"This type of text entry method ""guesses"" the word that a user desires by matching their sequence of keystrokes against feasible entries saved in a dictionary."

"Ralph Gorin, a graduate student under Earnest at the time, created the first true spelling checker program written as an applications program (rather than research) for general English text: SPELL for the DEC PDP-10 at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in February 1971."

"he made the first spelling corrector by searching the word list for plausible correct spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent letter transpositions and presenting them to the user."

"The first spell checkers were "verifiers" instead of "correctors." They offered no suggestions for incorrectly spelled words."

"The first spell checkers for personal computers appeared in 1980, such as "WordCheck" for Commodore systems which was released in late 1980 in time for advertisements to go to print in January 1981."

"Ispell has a very long history that can be traced back to a program that was originally written in 1971 in PDP-10 Assembly language by R. E. Gorin , and later ported to the C programming language and expanded by many others."

"Ispell then attempts to generate a list of possible corrections and presents the incorrect word and any suggestions to the user, who can then choose a correction, replace the word with a new one, leave it unchanged, or add it to the dictionary."

"Unlike GNU Aspell , ispell will only suggest corrections that are based on a Damerau–Levenshtein distance of 1; it will not attempt to guess more distant corrections based on English pronunciation rules."