In the program "Historically yours" on Europe 1 this Monday, the journalist David Castello-Lopes looks back on the history of self-correcting, this technique of assisting in typing text present on our mobile phones and sometimes on the source of great misunderstandings. 

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Historically yours

, David Castello-Lopes looks back on the origins of an object or a concept.

This Monday, he is looking at the autocorrect function, present on all our word processing tools, even in our SMS.

This invention dates back to the 1990s and there are no less than three fathers. 

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A tool subject to many complaints

"I notice that, among the things that most often make people bitch around me, we find mainly technological things. And in particular autocorrect. Autocorrect is this feature that now exists on all applications. where we have to write things down and correct our typos for us, found in word processing software, texting, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.

And it is true, in defense of people who complain, that sometimes the autocorrect is wrong.

You write 'Stéphane Bern', and he transforms that into 'I bought shampoo', without warning you, nor that you do not understand why.

Autocorrect is also very bad for swear words.

Because he basically refuses to consider swear words to exist.

This results in sending "duck" to someone you would more readily qualify with an 'o' and a second 'n'.

But what people who criticize autocorrect don't see is that nine times out of ten, it discreetly corrects spelling mistakes that you still make at 36 because you smoked joints in high school.

So I find autocorrect to be one of the best inventions in recent computer history.

That's why I wanted to know where he came from.

A triple paternity

And I found out that there are actually three inventors of autocorrect.

The first is a gentleman called Dean Hachamowitch.

An engineer at Microsoft, he first developed this feature in the 1990s, working on the word processing software Word.

For the anecdote, Dean Hachamovitch's first autocorrect made some pretty funny mistakes.

For example, he replaced the bank 'Goldman Sachs' with 'Goddamn Sachs', which means 'filth of Sachs'.

The second father of our current autocorrect is Martin King, the inventor is T9.

In the days of cellphones with keys, long before smartphones, each key had on the one hand a number and on the other hand not one, but three letters: 'ABC' for key 1, 'DEF' for key key 2, and so on.

To type C, you had to press the 1 key three times. Writing an SMS was therefore long and tedious.

Until Martin King created the T9, a software that allowed you to press once the key that contained the letter you wanted and which guessed, depending on the context, which word you wanted to write.

Martin King is therefore an unsung genius who made it possible for teenagers in the early 2000s to write their love texts faster, freeing up time to smoke cigarettes.

The turning point of the first iPhone

But to give birth to our current autocorrect, we would have had to wait for the arrival of the very first smartphone: the iPhone.

Its great innovation was not to have a keyboard with hard keys, but a tactile keyboard that only appears on the screen when you need it.

Except that typing on a tiny keyboard with our big nag fingers, we make a lot more mistakes than on a hard keyboard.

It was therefore necessary to invent a very powerful autocorrect.

And it is one of Steve Jobs' engineers to thank: Ken Kocienda.

It was he who created for the first iPhone the super-version of the autocorrect that we all use today, regardless of the brand of our phone.

Even if it is also because of him that our smartphone understands 'shampoo' when we type 'Stéphane Bern'. "