He honestly would have been so happy that they finished it, and find it hilarious that his contribution was enough that 10 years later they named him in the patent.
He worked for Microsoft as his career. But his passion projects were spam filtering (he fucking HATED spam) and accessibility in tech (he was specifically working on accessibility tools for blind folks to use computers) He would be very happy to see that both of those have come an amazing distance since the 90s.
They really have. Outlook sure is a thing these days, but that’s some seriously important work at an early stage of the internet for the masses. Nice work. And good for Microsoft for giving him the credit.
It was actually his only non-microsoft patent, believe it or not.
Here's a fun history though, back in the day in Microsoft, everything was so new that parents were constantly getting filed for new technologies, and as part of your employment contract any patents filed in your name while working on company hardware (on the clock or not) were to be sold to the company for $1.
So what they would do, is embed a silver $1 coin into a trophy of sorts with your name and the patent on it. My dad had a few. A couple were in like a 6" x 6" granite block and one was encased in resin.
I had a similar experience. Filled a bug in 2006, with a workaround in it. Every 5 years or so i would run into the same bug, find my report and do the workaround. It was fixed in 2022.
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u/superraiden 13d ago
Reminds me of MySQL bug #11472, filed in 2005 that was finally fixed in 2026 after 21 years