Blasts from the past... the old is new again.

Catching up on a newly subscribed blog for Derrick Coetzee, I came across a great post about Bloom Filters. I immediately recognized that use from the Borland Turbo Lightning product that I used in the mid to late 80s. It was an awesome TSR that loaded and then spell-checked whatever text proceeded the cursor at every space (or other work separator). A simple "beep" told you something was suspicious and a hot-key would popup the suggestions. It worked by scraping the screen RAM (in text mode, of course) and thus worked in EVERYTHING. I wonder if such a tool is available for Windows? Of course, I had to let Derrick know and that meant looking up the information and that's when the fun really started? Dig this quote from the April 1986 article from Jerry Pournelle

In the word-processing category, there's a three-way tie and an honorable mention. Tied for best of 1985 are Symantec's Q&A, Borland's Turbo Lightning, and Living Videotext's Ready! idea processor. It's impossible to choose among these; they're all useful. Two are memory-resident. I suppose that one day the trend to memory-resident software will be halted by a really excellent multitasking operating system. Maybe this year?

Ah, the good old days...