HOME PAGE MY TIMES TODAY’S PAPER VIDEO MOST POPULAR TIMES TOPICS Technology All NYT Technology WORLD U.S. N.Y. / REGION BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY CIRCUITS CAMCORDERS CAMERAS CELLPHONES COMPUTERS HANDHELDS HOME VIDEO MUSIC PERIPHERALS WI-FI DOWNLOADS SCIENCE HEALTH SPORTS OPINION ARTS STYLE TRAVEL JOBS REAL ESTATE AUTOS Back to front page » OCTOBER 18, 2007, 6:02 PM The Real History of WYSIWYG By JOHN MARKOFF TAGS: HISTORY, PERSONAL COMPUTING, SOFTWARE, WORD PROCESSOR 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 d [From The Real History of WYSIWYG – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog]