In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

O-K

F7 gang standup! When did the squiggles disappear? I do miss the variety in text formatting. You used to be able to animate text in Word and have squiggly double underline in different colours. Everything now is sans serif, sans variety.

yzydserd

I wish stories like this would be published before the nominee exits the stage.

tom_

Amusingly, Chen's article refers to the Wikipedia page as evidence that Tony Krueger did the port. The article's evidence for that in its latest version? A link back to Chen's article...!

apparent

I wish there was a button on my keyboard that I could press when there's a red squiggle in the last N words, which would cause my computer to fix the underlined word to its best guess. It should wait until a few words later, to get more context. It should flash the new word as it's being inserted, so I can easily see what it's done. Spell check used to be kind of lousy, but with AI I imagine it would have a very high rate of accuracy in context. I am greatly slowed down by having to delete a few words/chars every now and then, and if I could just smash a key and go on my way, it'd be much more efficient.

analog31

I want to see yellow squiggles under logic errors. That will keep the programmers busy for a while.

kumarvvr

I love these articles. Like. Of the million possible ways this could go, squiggles were the one, and it was from decisions of one man, on a whim. Yet, they completely change the world.

_whoDis

When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.

jojobas

Teachers put red squiggles under misspelled words long before Word.

denkmoon

Another thing that has been completely broken by Microsoft over the years. Spell check in Word today is absolutely godawful, it generates more false positives than true positives by a massive margin. Shit like "the" having a red squiggle. Drives me insane as every time I see it I think about how far software has fallen.

alex_suzuki

Why can I always tell from the title of the submission and the microsoft.com domain that it’s Raymond? Love the guy.

kilpikaarna

> Tony was an early fan of the magic/comedy team Penn and Teller. A friend and colleague attended a show and hung out afterward to ask the duo to sign a photo for his friend Tony. “He was on the team that did the red and green squiggles in Word.” That’s some heavy duty corpo-brain to be introducing your friend with ”He was on the team that did X”.

N_Lens

Such a ubiquitous feature. Rest in peace Tony <3