On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 7:01 PM, Al Kossow <aek at
bitsavers.org> wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
Etymology
The phrase "what you see is what you get", from which the acronym derives, was
a catchphrase popularized by Flip
Wilson's drag persona Geraldine, first appearing in September 1969, then regularly in
the early 1970s on The Flip Wilson
Show. The phrase was a statement demanding acceptance of Geraldine's entire
personality and appearance.
As it relates to computing, there are multiple claims to first use of the phrase:
In mid-1975, John W. Seybold, the founder of Seybold Publications, and researchers
at PARC, incorporated Gypsy
software into Bravo to create Bravo 3, which allowed text to be printed as displayed.
Charles Simonyi and the other
engineers appropriated Flip Wilson's popular phrase around that time.[13][14]
Barbara Beeton reports that the term was coined by Bill Tunnicliffe in a
presentation at a 1978 committee meeting
involving the Graphic Communications Association (GCA), the American Mathematical Society
(AMS), and the Printing
Industries of America (PIA).[15]
The phrase was coined in 1982[16] by Larry Sinclair, an engineer at Information
International, Inc. ("Triple I") to
express the idea that what the user sees on the screen is what the user gets on the
printer while using the "page layout
system", a pre-press typesetting system first shown at ANPS in Las Vegas.[when?]
Sure...
My point is that a very similar phrase ('What you see, you get') was
used by a camera manufactuer
some 15 years earlier (at least).
-tony
But the camera ad did not have WYSYG it had the full sentence and was
not pronounced as Wissygit or some variation.
By the 1980s that new word from the pronunciation of the acronym trend
had started to happen.
Likely its older than that but its a evolutionary thing as to usage and
how it was said and written.
That lead to WYSIWYG pronounced as wizzywhig, from the former what you
see is what you get. There were variations
as well.
Allison