One of the cool things I remember doing was to lay out a page with
multiple columns and boxes containing photos, then filling in text
around these items on the page. All this on screen, in WYSIWYG, running
on a DOS PC.

At the time, I thought the software was so good, I refused to pirate it!
The program was $50, and additional font disks were (IIRC) only $6 each
for 5" floppies.

Obviously, times have changed, and we don't use 9-pin dot matrix
printers anymore. But the point is: this was a WYSIWYG word processing,
page layout program that ran under DOS.

it wasn't wysiwyg. it was wysiawyg. almost what you get.

As opposed to Apple, if you are to be believed, which was WYSIOWG -
only what you get.

wrong.

the ad even states 'the size may vary on some other printers'.

that they included a disclaimer is a very big clue.

you might have been impressed with it enough to break from your illicit
piracy habits, but the manufacturer even admits it's *not* an exact
match for what came out of the printer.

If that is your definition of WYSIWYG then modern Apple and Windows
systems are not WYSIWYG in that what comes out of the printer is
rarely an exact match for what you see on the screen. And remember, it
was you, just now, introduce the need for an *exact* match.

wrong. nothing has been introduced. i said that the design of mac os
was the first mainstream computer designed with wysiwyg built into the
os itself (i.e., every app) and that what dos did could only be an
approximation which varied depending on all sorts of factors.

all things considered, what dos did was pretty good given the numerous
limitations of the hardware and software, however, it was not as good
as what the mac could do out of the box.

tl;dr anyone who claims dos can do wysiwyg never used a mac.

one of the key features of the macintosh was wysiwyg as part of the os
itself, which means *all* apps are wysiwyg, and nearly two years before
that ad ran.

and while you were fussing with dot-matrix printers, the mac was
printing wysiwyg to the laserwriter at its native resolution.

Laserwriter was 300 dpi while the resolution of the screen of the
classic Macintosh 512x342 on a 9" screen which equals about 68
pixels/inch. Using the definition you used to disqualify Fontasy on
DOS as WYSIWYG the classic MacIntosh was not WYSIWYG either.

wrong. the size was the same, as was the layout, just at a higher
resolution.

it was wygibtwys, what you get is better than what you see.

once again, you don't understand something and choose to argue.

oh, and the laserwriter had appletalk networking built in. multiple
macs and laserwriters could be networked together using ordinary
telephone cord, which was already in the walls. not only any app, but
any mac on the network could print wysiwyg. nothing on the pc side came
anywhere close to that for many years.