How WYSIWYG Works

The Macintosh operating system pioneered the concept of WYSIWYG (“wizzywig,” short for “what you see is what you get”). Part of the idea was to do away with embedded formatting codes, which were used by contemporary word processing programs as well as typesetting systems. Instead, you would assign typographical attributes to text through a menu or dialog box, meaning that you would never see the formatting commands, just their effects. This way of working became so popular—especially with novices—and was so commonly assumed to be the wave of the future, that code-driven text-processing systems were driven into extinction almost overnight. Very few persist today, and they are used almost exclusively in large-volume book-publishing environments.

The core of the Apple Macintosh revolution, though, was that its operating system provided a broad range of services for the application programs that ran under it (word processors, spreadsheet programs, graphics programs, etc.). In exchange for those services, the applications had to have a standard user interface.