The Automatic Proofreader is a series of checksum utilities published by COMPUTE! Publications for its COMPUTE! and COMPUTE!'s Gazette magazines and various books. These programs allow home computer users to detect errors when entering BASIC type-in programs. They display a checksum for each line which can be compared against the one printed in the magazine; if they are the same then the line was typed correctly.
The program was initially published for use with the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 in 1983.[1] The Automatic Proofreader was later made available for the Atari 8-bit computers,[2] Apple II,[3] IBM PC, and PCjr.[4]