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

That larger point landed with people more than the obituary details. The strongest reaction was recognition that software is full of these buried authorship moments. People build whole careers on systems work, infrastructure, or hard technical problems, then get remembered for one tiny user-facing behavior that escaped into the world and stayed there. Several comments pushed that into a complaint about software culture itself. Movies and games have credits. Most software does not, so the people behind ubiquitous features disappear unless someone like Chen writes them back into history. The most concrete product discussion was not about whether squiggles are clever. It was about where they break. Multilingual users described spellcheck as steady visual noise because many applications still assume one language per document, or worse, one language per UI locale. That turns a helpful cue into background irritation, and commenters pointed out that Firefox’s ability to use multiple dictionaries shows the problem is not the squiggle metaphor. It is the product decision to model users too narrowly. A related thread argued that modern Word has regressed badly here, with keyboard layout and language detection interacting in ways that create false positives even on common words. A smaller but useful side conversation corrected a likely false memory about prior art. One commenter initially claimed an Amiga word processor had red squiggles before Word, then went back, ran the old software in an emulator, and retracted the claim. It had continuous spell checking, but signaled errors by blinking instead. That distinction mattered because it reinforced the actual novelty being honored here. Real-time spellcheck already existed in some form. The durable invention was this specific visual treatment, which proved unobtrusive enough to survive for decades. There was also a brief detour into source quality after someone thought Chen was citing Wikipedia in a circular way for Krueger’s work on Chip’s Challenge. Others checked the edit history and the article wording, and the supposed citogenesis turned out not to be real. The sourcing loop was narrower than it looked.