Oct 19, 2007
Where did WYSIWYG come from?
For those of us who grew up with Wordstar, an early and popular word processing program, as well as other software text editors, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get text editing was a revelation.
Seeing an Alto personal computer at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 or 1980 had that impact on me. For writers and researchers a paper-like screen was a huge leap into the world of the Office of the Future, even though it ultimately didn’t happen quite the way Xerox would have enjoyed.
Of course that was almost three decades ago, and today writing tools that aren’t WYSIWYG are as quirky and unheard of as cars that start with cranks.
On Tuesday night one of the highlights of the Computer History Museum’s annual Fellows awards in Mountain View, Calif., was a short bit of history occasioned by Chuck Thacker, a legendary Xerox hardware designer, who would later design the tablet computer at Microsoft.
The first true WYSIWYG editor was a program written for the Alto called Bravo, created in 1974 by Charles Simonyi and Butler Lampson, which would ultimately lead to the development of Microsoft Word some years later. And most histories credit the term WYSIWYG to an industry newsletter of that name that began in the late 1970s.
However, on Tuesday night, Mr. Thacker revealed the real origins of the term. He said it was coined by his wife, Karen, who upon seeing an Alto running Bravo, turned to him and said, “You mean, what I see is what I get?”
Seeing an Alto personal computer at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 or 1980 had that impact on me. For writers and researchers a paper-like screen was a huge leap into the world of the Office of the Future, even though it ultimately didn’t happen quite the way Xerox would have enjoyed.
Of course that was almost three decades ago, and today writing tools that aren’t WYSIWYG are as quirky and unheard of as cars that start with cranks.
On Tuesday night one of the highlights of the Computer History Museum’s annual Fellows awards in Mountain View, Calif., was a short bit of history occasioned by Chuck Thacker, a legendary Xerox hardware designer, who would later design the tablet computer at Microsoft.
The first true WYSIWYG editor was a program written for the Alto called Bravo, created in 1974 by Charles Simonyi and Butler Lampson, which would ultimately lead to the development of Microsoft Word some years later. And most histories credit the term WYSIWYG to an industry newsletter of that name that began in the late 1970s.
However, on Tuesday night, Mr. Thacker revealed the real origins of the term. He said it was coined by his wife, Karen, who upon seeing an Alto running Bravo, turned to him and said, “You mean, what I see is what I get?”