Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today

Spell checking is such a ubiquitous feature of today's software that we expect to see it in browsers and basic text editors, and on just about every computing device. However, 50 years ago, it was a significant challenge to implement due to the paucity of memory that affected even the supercomputers of the era. The solution was so effective that the core technology developed—a lossless compression algorithm—is still in use today.

Okay, so a five-decade computing story is hardly 'news' but...