Gypsy was the first modern document preparation system, using the modern style of GUI (in which the mouse was used to initiate commands), and would be familiar to any user of a modern personal computer. It was the second WYSIWYG document preparation program, a successor to the ground-breaking Bravo on the seminal Xerox Alto personal computer.
It was produced at Xerox PARC by Larry Tesler and Timothy Mott, along with Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi, and other colleagues in 1975, starting with Bravo as a base. It was produced for use at Ginn & Co., a Xerox subsidiary in Boston which published textbooks. (The term "cut and paste" comes from the editors at Ginn, who were the first to indicate that such a capability would be useful.)
Although similar in capabilities to Bravo, the user interface of Gypsy was radically different. Rather than require the user to memorize an extensive command set (which would have been activated by typing various characters on the keyboard), as in Bravo, Gypsy instead used the mouse to initiate commands. (Gypsy was the first program to make use of the mouse for commands; all previous uses of the mouse had simply been for marking locations in the text, as well as selecting areas of the text.)
| This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors). | 
|
| Word 2008 Branch | ||
| Preceded by Bravo |
Gypsy | Followed by BravoX |
| "Legacy" trunk | ||
| Influenced by Smalltalk |
Gypsy | Influenced --- |
| Mac OS X branch | ||
| Influenced by --- |
Gypsy | Influenced Apple Lisa |