Autocorrect
Remember Autocorrect, the feature that corrects your errors as you type along? Sure, it often makes funny mistakes while correcting you (hence sites like Damn You Autocorrect!), but all in all a very useful thing. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote this article on the history of autocorrect and points out that autocorrect was a necessary condition for the success of the touchscreen: “The whole notion of touchscreen typing, where our podgy physical fingers are expected to land with precision on tiny virtual keys, is viable only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.” Kind of ironical that a feature that Microsoft came up with for MS Word became the foundation on which Apple built its empire! Once it started developing autocorrect, Microsoft realized it had to expand the standard dictionary…a lot. So it asked one its interns, Christopher Thorpe, to write a script that compiled all the manual entries that Microsoft employees had made to their custom dictionaries. Fas...