wumpus /wuhm'p*s/ n.
The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a
famous family of very early computer games called "Hunt The
Wumpus'. The original was invented in 1970 (several years before
ADVENT) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus
lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's
edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies,
including an icosahedron and Möbius strip). The player
started somewhere at random in the cave with five `crooked
arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms,
and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the
wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players,
the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not
merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him)
but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would
pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions
added `anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and
earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).
This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the
even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the
dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it
prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to the latter
(Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat
colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at
the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.ccil.org/retro.
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WYSIAYG /wiz'ee-ayg/ adj.
Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is
All You Get"; an unhappy variant of WYSIWYG. Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style
interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to
lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be
better served by a command-style interface. When this happens,
the frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most
often used of editors, word processors, and document formatting
programs. WYSIWYG `desktop publishing' programs, for example, are
a clear win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and
graphics in them, especially things like newsletters and
presentation slides. When typesetting book-length manuscripts, on
the other hand, scale changes the nature of the task; one quickly
runs into WYSIAYG limitations, and the increased power and
flexibility of a command-driven formatter like TeX or Unix's troff
becomes not just desirable but a necessity. Compare YAFIYGI.
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WYSIWYG /wiz'ee-wig/ adj.
[Traced to Flip Wilson's "Geraldine" character c.1970]
Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is What You
Get", as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure commands
that do not result in immediate visual feedback. True WYSIWYG in
environments supporting multiple fonts or graphics is a a
rarely-attained ideal; there are variants of this term to express
real-world manifestations including WYSIAWYG (What You See Is
Almost What You Get) and WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is
More or Less What You Get). All these can be mildly derogatory,
as they are often used to refer to dumbed-down user-friendly interfaces targeted at
non-programmers; a hacker has no fear of obscure commands
(compare WYSIAYG). On the other
hand, EMACS was one of the very first
WYSIWYG editors, replacing (actually, at first overlaying) the
extremely obscure, command-based TECO.
See also WIMP
environment. [Oddly enough, WYSIWYG has already made it
into the OED, in lower case yet. --ESR]