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

devblogs.microsoft.com

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

#71

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rob74 wrote: post #68
jll29 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1st Word on the Atari ST 520+ with monochrome monitor: that was how the far future felt like in 1986. With the exception of the somewhat wobbly cheap keyboard, that was the best and most distraction-free setup I have ever seen for WYSIWYG word processing (sadly never tried the Xerox workstations).

Sorry, but as a former Amiga user I have to jump on the opportunity to disrespect the Atari ST: wasn't the same thing (WYSIWYG text editing or even desktop publishing on a monochrome monitor) already possible years before with the Apple Mac? I mean, it was nicknamed the "Jackintosh" for a reason. Ok, it was only one year (the Mac being famously released in 1984, and the Atari ST in 1985). And of course the Atari ST w…

MacWrite was very basic, even compared to 1st Word, although it did support multiple fonts, which weren't possible on the ST without some effort.

1st Word Plus (1987) was a huge improvement and used professionally in magazine publishing.

MS Word was always bloated and poorly-designed in comparison.

In terms of getting useful work done with a minimum of effort, all of the 80s WPs, both command-line and WYSIWYG, were superior to Word.

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

#72

Post by rob74 »

abanana wrote: post #70
vidarh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find screenshots or descriptions of that either (but it doesn't really say much either way - I couldn't find much about the spellchecking at all). But re: colors, a lot of applications would open their own screens and set their own palette, so the Workbench palette isn't necessarily relevant.

Indeed, no relevance at all. Sorry rob74, that's a misunderstanding of how large applications most often tended to work on the Amiga. They didn't generally open a window on the Workbench screen, they opened their own screen. The keyboard shortcut - cycled between them. A word processor's screen could then have 16+ colours.

No problem! My recollection is a bit hazy, and I'm not active enough in retrocomputing to refresh it. I was aware that applications could use their own graphics modes, but I wasn't aware anymore just how often "productivity" software did that too. But of course, it made sense, since the Workbench screen was limited to 4 colors (in order to save memory, I guess, especially the precious "chip memory" that was accessible to the custom chips), and on their own screen they could use a whopping 16 colors :)

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

#73

Post by bambax »

_whoDis wrote: post #23

When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.

Yes, I have the same problem. Some programs handle this better than others. The Affinity suite is esp. bad.

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

#74

Post by Lendal »

If you continue in this industry of software creation in a corporate setting, and you put your name into the source code, eventually you will become known for products/features that you never expected to become known for. And the things you had actually worked the hardest on and hoped to become known for will be lost and forgotten to time.

The process of creating things is completely within your control but the process of becoming known for a thing is completely beyond your control.

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

#75

Post by netsharc »

denkmoon wrote: post #29

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.

Word now switches the document language when you switch keyboard layouts... and then when you focus on a word you typed that it's memorized to be in that language, it switches the keyboard back to that layout.

As someone who uses the US layout but switches it to German to get ä, ü, ö, it's a schizophrenic experience...

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

#77

Post by Hnrobert42 »

_whoDis wrote: post #23

When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.

While your point is valid, I think you are missing the point of the article.

The point was that someone the author was fond of passed away. The author who likely might be reading these comments. And Krueger did some cool stuff that everyone use without realizing who did it.

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

#79

Post by junon »

bambax wrote: post #73
_whoDis wrote: post #23

When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.

Yes, I have the same problem. Some programs handle this better than others. The Affinity suite is esp. bad.

You can disable language checks under the paragraph or character tab for the text item (I forget which). A little annoying but at least makes them go away.

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

#80

Post by toyg »

jll29 wrote: post #62

> he accomplished this without the source code Sure thing, who needs source code? This is HN. But instead of reverse-engineering, I would just find or write an emulator, in case I would be asked to "port" another software. It's actually sad that for the most part, we don't know who is responsible for the good and bad features of software we use. In movies, there is an extensive practice of showing "credits" at the en…

> I would just find or write an emulator

Nowadays, yes. Back then, systems could barely run the OS they came with...

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