01/02/03
Pages 194-210
Charles Simonyi wrote the Bravo word processor for the Alto. It was the first ever "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) word processor in which the user could see graphics, underlining, boldface, italics, and fonts of various styles and sizes. Butler Lampson contributed the key idea of holding a document in memory as "pieces" rather than as a single block so that inserting a sentence in the middle of a document, for example, did not require shifting all the text around in memory, but just adding another "piece," and marking where it fit in.
Unfortunately, the command-driven user interface to Bravo was very difficult to use. Larry Tesler and Tim Mott in the SSL had been working on a graphical user interface for POLOS, the time-shared office software that never became a product. Tesler and Mott adapted their graphical user interface for use with Bravo and called the new interface Gypsy.
Mott had worked for a publishing division of Xerox before he worked at PARC, and so in developing the user interface, he took the at-that-time unprecedented step of working with actual users by observing them and asking questions as they worked in the publishing business. As the users sat in front of a dummy set up, Mott asked them to describe what they would like the system to do. They described their activity in terms of what they did with paper during the publishing process. Their description of needing to delete a block of text from one place in a document and to place it elsewhere in the document as "cut" and "paste" is the origin of the use of those terms in contemporary word processors.
Gypsy and Bravo worked so well on the Alto that the POLOS time-sharing project was cancelled. Later (p. 283), Simonyi rewrote Bravo to include the Gypsy interface and called the updated version BravoX. Eventually, he left Xerox PARC for Microsoft and implemented basic ideas from BravoX in Microsoft Word.