That's a fun legacy. Glad the squiggles were well received!
Also, this is a pretty epic footnote:
Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished [porting Chip's Challenge] without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.
Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide “Now would be a good time to spell-check the document” just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit.
My first reaction was, "Wow, it seems so easy to do this without blocking or taking several seconds."
But then I remember this would have been early 90s, so you're probably working with 4-8 MB of RAM, so you can't just keep the whole English word list in memory. Plus, I'm not sure what multi threaded processing was like in C++ in the early 90s, but I know it was unpleasant in the late 00s, so this was probably a pretty tricky problem.
bitshift | a day ago
That's a fun legacy. Glad the squiggles were well received!
Also, this is a pretty epic footnote:
junon | 13 hours ago
The Penn and Teller / Weird Al nods would have been incredible feelings too, for sure.
Fun legacy indeed! Thanks Tony.
EDIT: Just looked him up. He worked at Microsoft until the very end; started in 1989. Just over 37 years if my math is right.
LeahNeukirchen | 13 hours ago
It's a good feature, but I cringe everytime the squiggles end up in print or on slides, because people use screenshots there?...
kwas | 13 hours ago
I think it's most often seen either from Google Docs or Apple Notes, you can tell by their default styling.
mtlynch | 6 hours ago
My first reaction was, "Wow, it seems so easy to do this without blocking or taking several seconds."
But then I remember this would have been early 90s, so you're probably working with 4-8 MB of RAM, so you can't just keep the whole English word list in memory. Plus, I'm not sure what multi threaded processing was like in C++ in the early 90s, but I know it was unpleasant in the late 00s, so this was probably a pretty tricky problem.