In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
This post pays tribute to the person behind the now-ubiquitous red and green squiggly underlines for spell and grammar checking, a feature that started in Microsoft Word and spread to nearly every word processor and beyond.
Background
Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" is a long-running Microsoft blog (since 2003) that shares behind-the-scenes stories from Windows and Office development, often personal or historical in nature. This post memorializes an unnamed Microsoft developer who created the red-underline spellcheck and green-underline grammar-check squiggles that first appeared in Microsoft Word and later became a standard UI feature across word processors, browsers, and even code editors. The squiggly-underline convention is so ubiquitous that most users never think about who invented it; Chen's post is a quiet tribute to that engineer, noting their recent passing and the massive, invisible influence of their work. No technical details or further names are given in this brief notice.