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:
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:
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.
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