In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words(devblogs.microsoft.com)
475 points by saikatsg 19 hours ago | 78 comments
tl;dr: Tony Krueger, a longtime Microsoft Word developer, passed away. He's credited with making spell-check non-blocking and introducing the now-ubiquitous red (and later green) squiggly underlines for misspellings and grammar errors. He also ported Chip's Challenge to Windows by reverse-engineering the MS-DOS version without source code.
HN Discussion:
  • Prior software like Prowrite on Amiga had real-time spell checking with red squiggles before Word
  • Squiggles are annoying, distracting, or unhelpful, especially in multilingual or non-standard writing contexts
  • Appreciation for the squiggle UI pattern as an intuitive and impactful design decision
  • Software developers deserve more visible credit for their contributions, like movie credits
  • Wikipedia citation for the Chip's Challenge port circularly references Chen's own article