A Recent History of Writing And Drawing

The phrase was originated by John Seybold and popularized at Xerox PARC during the late 1970s when the first WYSIWYG editor, Bravo was created on the Alto. The Alto monitor (72 pixels per inch) was designed so that one full page of text could be seen and then printed on the first laser printers. When the text was laid out on the screen 72 PPI font metric files were used, but when printed 300 PPI files were used - thus one would occasionally find characters and words slightly off, a problem that continues to this day. (72 PPI came from the standard of 72 "points" per inch used in the commercial printing industry.)

The Apple Macintosh system was originally designed so that the screen resolution and the resolution of the dot-matrix printers sold by Apple were easily scaled: 72 PPI for the screen and 144 DPI for the printers. Thus, the on-screen output of programs such as MacWrite and MacPaint were easily translated to the printer output and allowed WYSIWYG. With the introduction of laser printers, with resolutions not even multiples of the screen resolution, true WYSIWYG vanished.

This approach owes its origins to research into workstation technology pioneered by Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center, later picked up by Interleaf (for its Technical Publishing Software, running on Unix workstations) and more popularly in Apple's Macintosh computer. Initial sales of the Macintosh were slow, but were rescued in 1985 by the launch of Aldus PageMaker, the first WYSIWYG typesetting and page makeup program on a personal computer. PageMaker was followed on the Macintosh by MacPublisher, ReadySetGo, Ragtime and Quark Xpress, and on the PC platform by Ventura Publisher.

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