The New Minimum Standard For Modern Editors


In the past, when the idea of computers graphically representing the result of a user’s actions before printing seemed like a plan for the future, a Hungarian programmer had an idea. He wanted to create an editor capable of accurately replicating the final output of a user’s work on a computer. His name was Charles Simonyi, and his project was called Bravo, which became known as the first rich text editor program that operated on WYSIWYG principles.

Xerox PARC, the company behind Bravo’s development, never commercialized it on a large scale. But the young Hungarian programmer was hired by an even younger man named Bill Gates.

Charles Simonyi became responsible for developing a text editor we now know as Microsoft Word. It wasn’t until the 90s, however, that the internet saw the simplest version of the complexity that editors like Word already displayed. This period can be identified by a single markup tag: the