Edith

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:00 AM -0400 8/22/02, James A. Landau wrote:
>WYSIWYG
>
>acronym for "What You See Is What You Get".  Actually not a proverb but an
>adjective, meaning that your text and graphics are displayed on the computer
>monitor in a precise rendition (or a close enough facsimile) of what will be
>printed on paper.
>
>this acronym had about a ten-year life.  It first appeared to describe the
>bit-mapped text and graphics on the Apple Lisa (1983) and the slightly later
>Apple Macintosh, and then was applied to Microsoft Windows and IBM's OS/2
>when they became widespread in the early 1990's.  Then came Microsoft Windows
>95, in which you had to work hard to get anything EXCEPT bit-mapped text, and
>about the same time or maybe a little later the UNIX community began using
>the X-Windows GUI.  This meant that almost everyone who had up-to-date
>systems was using WYSIWYG, and since the acronym was no longer needed to
>differentiate bitmap and non-bitmap displays, it dropped out of use.
>
No wonder I always have trouble when I use this as an example of an
acronym in class anymore.  Dropped out of use?  Who knew?

[I wouldn't call it an adjective, but a nominal typically used in
noun-noun compounds, but that's another issue.]

larry