The inventor on the patent for autocorrect and the closest thing it has to an individual creator is Dean Hachamovitch. And you could say it all started in the early '90s when Hachamovitch first joined Microsoft. He was given a job on the Word team and back then, word processing was at a crossroads: on one side were the people who wanted adornments and frills—improved desktop publishing, color separation, and things like that. On the other side was the functionality gang, where Hachamovitch found his place.
These guys really 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, according to him, is a matter of "a little bit of creativity and a whole lot of scutwork." Hachamovitch thought he could improve the typing experience by delivering us from scut. He set out to make our typing sleek and invisible, smooth as speaking from a teleprompter.
As WIRED pointed out, 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 who is widely recognized as the father of graphical word processing, Word had a "glossary" that could be used as a sort of auto-expander.
It allowed to 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. Neat. But Hachamovitch realized that this glossary could be used far more aggressively to correct common mistakes. He put together a bit of code that would allow you to press the left arrow and F3 at any time and immediately replace teh with the. His eureka moment came when he understood that because English words are space-delimited, the space bar itself could generate the replacement, making the correction automatic. Hachamovitch then compiled a list of common errors, and his team got to work. One Microsoft manager even dubbed them the Department of Stupid PC Tricks.
Pretty soon, the team realized that autocorrect could also be used in less productive but far more entertaining tasks. One day, for example, Hachamovitch went into his boss' machine and changed the autocorrect dictionary so that any time he typed Dean, it was automatically changed to the name of his coworker Mike, and vice versa (his boss kept both his computer and office locked after that). Children were quick to pick this up too—after Hachamovitch went to speak to his daughter's third-grade class, he started receiving emails from the kids' parents, saying something along the lines of "Thank you for coming to talk to my daughter's class, but whenever I try to type her name, I find it automatically transforms itself into 'The pretty princess.'"
So now that you know the origins of autocorrect, do you really think all these hippos, I mean, hiccups on the list are accidental?
