Editing Richard Brodie (programmer) (section)

===Microsoft===
Simonyi hired Brodie in 1981 as Microsoft's 77th employee and a founding member of the Microsoft Application Division.

Brodie distinguished himself at Microsoft by creating the first version of [[Microsoft Word]] in less than seven months.<ref name=Tsang /> In addition to primary authorship of Microsoft Word, he wrote Microsoft's first C compiler, the original version of [[Microsoft Notepad|Notepad]], and Word for the IBM PC Jr.

Brodie's success as a programmer brought him to the attention of [[Bill Gates]], who made Brodie his technical assistant in 1983.<ref>{{cite book | title = Heart at Work | author = Jack Canfield and Jacqueline Miller | publisher = McGraw-Hill | year = 1998 | isbn = 0-07-012030-7 | url = https://archive.org/details/heartatworkstori00jack }}</ref> Brodie's primary accomplishment as Gates's assistant was the management of the Cashmere project, which was released as Word for Windows.
During the Cashmere design, Brodie came up with the idea of the [[Combo box]] (a combination text box and drop-down menu widely used today), the [[Ribbon (computing)|Ribbon]] (a strip of buttons at the top of the screen used to display and change formatting), and the squiggly red underline that checks and flags spelling errors automatically. <ref name=Tsang />

Brodie left Microsoft after the company went public in 1986, but returned in 1991 as Chief Software Designer and Lead Developer of the Omega project, which was released as [[Microsoft Access]] in 1992. He left Microsoft again in 1994.<ref>{{cite book | title = Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft From the Inside | author = Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller | publisher = Henry Holt and Co. | year = 1999 | isbn = 0-8050-5755-2}}</ref>