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I dunno, there was an article in Creative Computing magazine circa 1984 about how to code one up in BASIC that required a little creativity but made it look pretty easy. If you sort the words in the document it is pretty quick to check them against a dictionary on disk.

Turbo Lighting, though, took advantage of the comparably large memory of the IBM PC to do something that really blew people away

https://books.google.com/books?id=MC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA7&lpg=PA...

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I remember using Turbo Lightning. It was incredible. You type a word in some DOS program, and when you hit the spacebar, a beep would sound if the word was spelled wrong. Back then Peter Norton was all the rage, so if you typed "Norton" TL would beep and suggest spellings like "notion, nothing, etc." to correct Norton. The suggestions felt so AIish and futuristic to me. Wow a "suggestion" for how to spell something? If you selected a replacement, it would stuff the keyboard buffer with backspaces, to erase the word, and retype the correction. Borland made incredible software back then. Great times.

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