History
The first documented use of incremental search was in EMACS on ITS in the late 1970s. This was one of the many essential Emacs features Richard Stallman included in his reimplementation, GNU Emacs. Other noteworthy programs containing this functionality in the 1980s include bash and Canon Cat. These early implementations offered single line feedback, not lists of suggestions.
The first mainstream appearance may have been in the Speller for WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows, released 30 November 1992. As programmer Robert John Stevens, now CEO of WriteExpress, watched users at the WordPerfect Usability Lab in Orem, Utah use the 5.1 Speller that he and Steven M. Cannon ported to Windows, he noticed that when a word was not found in the dictionary and no alternative words were presented, users seemed lost, moved the mouse cursor around the page and even exited the Speller. Dumbstruck by the anomaly, he went home, sat on the couch and discussed his observations with his wife. Stevens coded the solution: as a user typed in the edit box, Speller would suggest words beginning with the letters entered.
Stevens' Spell Check program was also used in Novell GroupWise.
Read more about this topic: Incremental Search
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)