reminds me of the story of the Shuji Nakamura revolutionizing neon lights and getting a bonus of $180 for that work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura

Such a ubiquitous feature. Rest in peace Tony <3

I love Raymond Chen's stuff; particularly the way he brings humanity to our everyday tech.

All this time I thought they were little tiny X's until I just now looked really closely.

Used to get slick ads for nightclubs and events from promoters with the red squiggles printed on them. Nice, full color, glossy, 4x6 card size ads that they'd stick on car windshields, hand out on the street, and stuff into any nook or cranny they could find. I was somewhat mystified as to what production process they used that allowed for the squiggles to remain and why what they were trying to indicate was ignored as most of the errors were indeed errors. Simply sending a document to a print device normally does not preserve the squiggles but somehow, they would end up in the adverts.

> 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”.

This was a lovely tribute. As much as we like to complain about windows, there's clearly a lot of love and care that has been put in to it by people like Tony

I really envy people who take pride in what they've created. I wish I could build something that becomes standardized like that too. How happy must Tony Krueger have been? Now that everyone uses the feature he built as a standard Rest in Peace

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.

At my office we refer to these (in IntelliJ) as ketchup, mustard, and relish (depending on the color).