Joe Guthridge is best known for his contributions to the development of a family of word processing software that began in the 1980s.
This was a recognition by Bill Gates of seven non-Microsoft employees who made important contributions to the development of Windows.
[4] Joe Guthridge led the development of Samna Amí, the first Windows word processor, which was subsequently renamed Lotus Word Pro somewhat after Samna was acquired by Lotus Software.
Among the strengths of Ami Pro, successor to Samna Amí, were scientific writing, including equation editing.
[5] Even after the internal file format of the original .sam evolved to .lwp (Lotus Word-Processing), Microsoft and Wordperfect supported exporting to this product,[6] which was described in a review as having a mail-merge "much faster than Word, somewhat faster than WordPerfect"[7] An international study about gridlock during rush hours cited Joe Guthridge's opinion that "evening rush hours are usually worse than their morning equivalent, because at the start of the day people are intent on getting to work, while on the way home they often make one or two traffic-slowing stops.