NoSpotOfGround

Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.

The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

TL;DR

If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:

• McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.

• For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.

• When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.

• They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.

• McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.

• Using Golomb’s code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.

• Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.

There was something wrong here, but the… right kind of wrong.

Looking back, those times were an incredible desert of of titillation compared to the desserts of today.

I had a similar thing with a pen, the very same year I think… I had a mildly special pen which one day I lost. Went looking for it and found it sitting on a (slightly older) classmate’s desk, so i grabbed it and said “hey, that’s mine”. He tried to pretend that no, it was his, and he sounded very convincing about it, and even got the teacher involved. They both looked at me with infuriatingly condescending expressions as I explained how it was mine.

The teacher suggested “just let him have it” to the classmate, who conceded.

I went back to my desk fuming and scratched my initials into it before returning to show them, "look, see, it was mine! The classmate immediately pointed out “you scratched those in just now” and I think I mumbled something incoherent before going back to my desk, to the teacher’s mortification with the whole situation.

It had already begun dawning on me at this point that the classmate was right… That wasn’t my pen. It was his and just looked like mine. But it was too late at this point and I didn’t know how to handle it other than to keep quiet and try to forget about it.