In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Raymond Chen memorializes Tony Krueger, the Microsoft developer who invented Word's red and green squiggle underlines.
Tony Krueger, a longtime Microsoft Word developer, implemented the feature that draws red squiggles under misspelled words and green ones under grammatical errors. Before his change, spell check was a blocking operation users often disabled. His unobtrusive version ran in the background and marked mistakes instantly. He also ported Chip's Challenge to Windows without source code by reverse-engineering the MS-DOS version. Penn Jillette and "Weird Al" Yankovic both celebrated the feature.
What commenters are saying
Commenters offer gratitude for the squiggles, noting they improved spelling through instant feedback. A few dissenters find the squiggles annoying, especially in multilingual documents where language detection fails, or cite accessibility issues for red-green colorblind users. Others lament that modern spell check quality has degraded. The thread also notes an amusing Wikipedia citogenesis loop where Chen's article became the source for Krueger's porting work, which Chen himself credited to Wikipedia.