How wise men became installation wizards

When you hear the word wizard, it's only natural to think of a magical grandfather figure with a staff and a long grey beard. Depending on your age and reading habits, perhaps Merlin, Gandalf or even Albus Dumbledore come to mind? However at some point wizards left the realms of fantasy for the computing world, specifically to become tools offering users guidance with things like installation. To find out how this happened, it's probably best to start at the beginning.

The earliest form of the word wizard can be traced back to the Middle English wysard, a combination of wys meaning 'wise' and the suffix -ard, a common formative used in nouns that denote people characterised by a specific action or trait (other examples include bastards, cowards and drunkards). So from around the 1440s a wizard was simply a wise man.

Over the next one hundred years wizards would acquire magic powers and started to be mentioned alongside witches and sorcerers. In a sermon in 1562 Hugh Latimerthe, the bishop of Worcester, said: "Whan we be in trouble, or sicknes, or lose any thing: we runne hither and thither to wyssardes, or sorcerers, whome we call wyse men."

Another century later and wizards were people who were skilled at their profession, so "wizards of histories" were historians, while "wizards who painted" were artists. At some point in the 1920s wizard also started to be used as a slang term for 'excellent or marvellous'. However it was the figurative take on the word that transferred into computing in the 1980s when the Hacker's Dictionary, a jargon.txt file maintained at MIT, described a wizard as a hacker or an expert in computing:

"A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works; someone who can find and fix his bugs in an emergency[...] A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people."

The concept of a wizard as tool or user interface to help users install or use software was introduced by Microsoft in 1991. The innovative "Page Wizard" was part of Microsoft Publisher and offered a step-by-step instructional guide that lead users through a series of design options.

The wizard started to crop up in other Microsoft software, assisting with installation, printer setup, internet connection and other things. It was introduced as a new term in the November edition of MacUser magazine in 1992:

"... we'd like you to meet Wizards, step-by-step guides that are designed to walk you through complex tasks."

The wizard was commonplace by the 2000s but today the term is starting to feel old hat and many companies are replacing wizards with assistants instead. Google's is actually called Google Assistant, while other companies have humanized their assistants with names like Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft). Sadly it seems the wizards of the 1990s are no longer considered quite so wizard. 

How breasts became browsers

While it is no surprise that some people use web browsers to keep abreast of the news, it might raise a few eyebrows to learn that breast is the most likely etymological origin of the word browser.

Browse can be traced back to the German word brust meaning breast.

Before being mangled in the mists of time, browse germinated from the word brouster, the Middle French for 'to crop and eat young shoots and leaves', stemming from the Old French word brost or broust meaning ‘buds or young shoots’. One theory is the English wrongly mistook the French word broust for past tense so dropped the 't' to make brouse. To go back even further, it has roots in the Old Saxon brustian ‘to bud or sprout’ and the Proto-Germanic breust or brust meaning ‘breast’ from the Proto-Indo-European bhreus- 'to swell'. These words have also resulted in the modern German brust meaning 'breast' and brustwarzen, which translates quite literally to ‘breast warts’, a descriptive if rather inelegant word for nipples. 

The earliest form of browse cropped up in the 15th century as bruse and brouse, referring to both the shoots and leaves eaten by animals, and also the act of eating the vegetation, hence the term browsing. So technically the first browsers were feeding animals like cows and goats but by the mid-16th century, a browser was also a person who cut the foliage for the animals to eat during the winter.

A browsing grey rhebok, a small antelope native to South Africa and Zimbabwe.

A few centuries later, people casually looking through books were compared to cattle lazily grazing, so this activity also became known as browsing and the people doing the browsing became known as browsers. One of the earliest references to browsing in this context appeared in the London Magazine in 1820:

"He brouzes on the husk and leaves of books, as the young fawn browzes on the bark and leaves of trees."

Another hundred years later the word browser made its way into computing with the introduction of an automatic indexing online retrieval system developed by IBM in 1971. This system provided the IBM 2260 with a natural query language and online browsing capabilities. The invention was effectively the grandfather of the modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer that are used by billions of people worldwide today.

The IBM 2260 computer that the first BROWSER was tested on.

Computer scientist John Williams called it the BROWSER, clearly inspired by the verb, but somewhat clumsily claiming it was an acronym for BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval. Unfortunately when it comes to naming things, some programmers can be prone to making boobs.

Logs, logins and backlogs

It might sound like an obvious association to make but I doubt many people would connect the terms log files, backlog and login with a chunk of wood despite it being the most likely origin of these words.

To start at the beginning, the root of the word log meaning ‘a bulky mass of wood’ isn't entirely clear. One theory links it to the Swedish låga meaning ‘a fallen tree lying on the ground’ and phonetically it does sound similar. Another theory is that log and the related clog arose from attempts to evoke the sense of something large and heavy. While others have linked it to lug meaning ‘something heavy and clumsy’, from the Dutch word log meaning ‘slow and heavy’. Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree but I think there is probably a case for all three.

The opening line of every episode of Star Trek, “Captain’s log, stardate...”, is perhaps the most famous cultural reference that hints at how log might have drifted into the realm of technology. However the answer isn't space travel but rather the sea or to be more specific, sailing.

"Captain's log stardate XXX" was the opening line for every episode of Star Trek.

A captain's log, or simply a log, was a record of observations or readings that started life on the high seas, specifically as an apparatus used to measure the speed of a ship. Sailors would throw a wooden log or board tied to 150 fathom (900 ft) length of rope overboard and would time how long it took to run out.

These daily recordings of their ship’s speed were kept in a log-book, a term which can be traced back to the 1670s. To untangle the root of another word, sailors would also tie knots in the string tied to the log-line and by counting these knots, were able to give the ship a more precise measurement of speed: knots per hour.

An example of a log and line from the National Maritime Museum.

The log-book is the most logical (from the Greek logos meaning 'reason' - not the wooden log!) answer for how log came to mean a record of performance or progress in technology. The verb to log would arise in the 1880s, initially referring to the entry of a man's name into a log-book for some kind of offence. This would later migrate into computing in the 1960s in the form of login, the act involving a user entering their name to access a computer, as well as logging in and logging out.

The original backlog was a large log placed at the back of a fireplace.

The other type of log that relates to a physical wooden log but with a different origin is the term backlog, meaning an accumulation of uncompleted work or matters to be dealt with. The etymological root of this word lies in the fireplace. Simply put, a backlog was the large log placed at the back of the fire that was intended to "smoulder for days" from the 1680s. The term was later used figuratively to mean 'something in reserve, reserves or an accumulation' by the late 1800s before the meaning changing to 'an arrears of unfulfilled orders or uncompleted work' from the 1930s. So that is the reason we have backlogs but no frontlogs, which I'd imagine would be more prone to rolling out and setting fire to your carpet! 🔥