created 2024-17-05, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2024computersmagicaggregator
Preface
Preface by saying this is going to be a ranty survey, and unedited. I just wanted to collect information on the topic. Some of this is difficult because it’s not fully documented, but we see the fruits of this trope all the way down to computer geek joke mugs. I will say that if I had to pick a side, I’d try to challenge the “computer domain expert as wizard/magic user” trope. I am not trying to be bitter because some romanticism of the topic does work when it is backed with meaning. I understand viewing it as a kind of magic is fun and can be done well. Magic can also be viewed as the process in which you don’t know how it was done.
Some examples may be wizard/magic adjacent but play into the theme and possible origins.
Another thing I noted is that I am not immune culturally. I have a markdown file of useful snippets on my dropbox called “magic” that I unthinkingly created years ago.
I do feel this trend might be on decline, but I am wondering about downstream side effects. That is, the kid innocently commenting on a youtube comment how he feels like a god when solving fizzbuzz, then has a professional career and makes software that affects people. If programming or computer expertise is magic, what is the role of the “day in life” code influencer? The AI run amok? The AI processing this trope into language model.
Feel free to add/edit.
Some motivation for research was “The Playlist” episode involving the coder. Episode was a complete cringe fest, very stereotypical. There was one good takeaway however. Initially the head project manager is requesting the developer character to make music buffering lag impossibly low - to the point where it is below human perception. Developer states it just isn’t possible, but progressively makes breakthroughs that allow him to reach this once deemed impossible milestone. This part rang true the most. It isn’t always the case, but situations like this do arise.
These screengrabs illustrate the visual effect. Binary motes, source code floating around the screen. Distanced from reality.
The Wizard Book
There’s this famous math/programming book that teaches Lisp from the 80s titled Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, colloquially called “The Wizard book” because of the cover. Frequently a common starter book, introducing college students to computer software. It begins (view chapter 1 here https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/Chapter-1.xhtml#Chapter-1)
We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer’s spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.
A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.
Fortunately, learning to program is considerably less dangerous than learning sorcery, because the spirits we deal with are conveniently contained in a secure way. Real-world programming, however, requires care, expertise, and wisdom. A small bug in a computer-aided design program, for example, can lead to the catastrophic collapse of an airplane or a dam or the self-destruction of an industrial robot.
A case of justified use
I’m putting this here early enough that if you read this you’ll see it because I think it’s one of the better examples and fantastic. Application of mathematics to “conjure” interview response from the rudiments that are already provided for most programmers (implementation of basic systems) with a witchy/wizardy feel. So unwrapping [].sort() by building a type systems, and comparison. How do you paint a pixel to the screen? Compel the words on the screen to be true or false where nothing exists. Axioms. Well written.
https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-interview
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have shifted during the night–the incorporeal equivalent of rummaging through that drawer in the back of the kitchen where we stash odd flanges, screwdrivers, and the strangely specific plastic bits: the accessories, those long-estranged black sheep of the families of our household appliances, their original purpose now forgotten, perhaps never known, but which we are bound to care for nonetheless. I’d like to walk you through a common interview question: reversing a linked list.
First, we need a linked list. Clear your workspace of unwanted xterms, sprinkle salt into the protective form of two parentheses, and recurse. Summon a list from the void.
(defn cons [h t] #(if % h t))
“That’s not a list,” the interviewer says. “That’s an if statement.”
“What else are lists,” you reply, your eyes flashing, “But alternatives?”
“To know a thing is to name it,” you advise. True names have power. The K language was invented by Ursula K. Le Guin, and is among the oldest and tersest forms of magic. To imbue a language with a letter of your own name is to give up an element of your self. Your own initials ache at the memory.
Part of a series, all worth reading, conjuring fizzbuzz
https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-interview
There is a gem in the comments, done in the style of William Gibson
Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards
https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/common-tech-jobs-described-as-cabals
In ancient Teotihuacan, which the Aztecs later named “the city of the gods,” they honored a Great Goddess: the Spider Woman. Today her cult yet lives on. She is worshipped by those who spin the Great Worldwide Web, variously called the web developers, or Wizards of the Web.
Some call them mobile engineers, but their true name is a complicated Nahuatl word that translates to “those who have tamed the black smoke mirrors.” They are the ones who have mastered the dark energies at work in the Other World. They are the ones who allow us all to See.
In the olden days the Aztecs would conduct ceremonies in which they looked into their round obsidian mirrors for glimpses of the Other World. Today we all carry an obsidian mirror in our pockets, although in the current fashion they have rectangular shapes. There is no need for ceremony. The mobile engineers have tamed the magic. With a few swipes of the fingers — remnants of an old, complicated ritual dance — you can inquire about the intentions of the sun and rain deities, or you can cast a spell to freeze an image into eternity, or you can establish an immediate link, through the Other World, to any other obsidian mirror on Earth.
How do they do it? They have books upon books of complicated formulae, and they spend countless hours weaving them into spells. Occasionally a talented magician is able to create a useful spell by themselves, but it’s more common for large guilds of them to form and toil together, for months or years, on the making of a single complex spell.
Once the spell is done, it is packaged into an “app” — from the Nahuatl word apazyahualtontli, meaning small container — and made available to whichever Onlookers want it.
Hypothesizing on Appeal
Powerful for the weak, one of the reasons magic is appealing to programmer types, is because they tend to be weaker in these areas, and they wish that they could have access to the same sort of power, but based on the things they are good at (studying tomes, complex incantations) rather than the things they aren’t good at (networking, salesmanship).
It is a single person victory, the magician to the laymen.
People like magic narratives because magic acts as a force multiplier for a single person
@Dyeje comments,
“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms.”
“Programmers are still stuck writing their incantations down in a way that devices made of elaborately etched metalloids — powered by lightning energy gained from harnessing the power of the wind, water, or, most commonly, motion itself via the liquified corpses of ancient beasts that used to dominate the earth — can understand and execute.
Contributions to “the sense”. This is partly true, but I feel it comes off once again as that “isolated mage smarty pants” that feeds into it. Why you should never interrupt a programmer -
arrogance
Lori Emerson brings magic display into focus in “Reading Writing Interfaces” roughly viewing “unveiled” as choice words in every introduction of new computing devices, evoking the sense of a magician revealing a hidden trick.
Aesthetic/Atmospheric playlist track titles, “you’re coding while starting to feel like you’ve understood the meaning of life”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3TOVBNSJDA
Magical Software Sucks - Throw errors, not assumptions.
https://dodov.dev/blog/magical-software-sucks
I hate magic in code. Magic is for end-users. To swipe your credit card and make a purchase without having to know, think, or care about what happens in the background. To turn on noise cancellation and instantly silence the outside world along with all the annoying people in it.
As a software developer, your job is to turn the lifeless metal bricks in people’s pockets and backpacks into artificial brains that can think billions of times faster than yours. The bad part is that these artificial brains are only as smart as you are. If you put in shitty logic, you get a shitty result.
To avoid shitty logic, you need to know what’s happening in your code. If there’s “magic” anywhere in the mix, you have a black box with no obvious cause and effect. This means that what you think is happening and what actually happens start to diverge. Naturally, you’d think that what happens is what you want to happen. But you can never be sure. It’s magic.
Software is built by humans and humans make mistakes. Therefore, software should be everything but magic. It shouldn’t be overly concise and clever — it should be explicit and predictable. It shouldn’t make assumptions — it should throw errors.
Magic exists only in fantasy books. Behind every magical user experience there is plenty of not-so-magical machinery. As developers, we are the ones who build that machinery. We don’t use the magic. We make the magic. If we try to combine both, we may get unpredictable and unintended results, so the magic in our code can ruin the magic for the end-user. Make the final product magical, not the software that runs it.
The text points out PHP “magic methods” https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.magic.php
Magic methods are special methods which override PHP’s default’s action when certain actions are performed on an object.
Couple of Quotes
Obvious quotes:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Clarke’s Third Law
I always thought Clarke used this in the sense that holding a kindle, which is a whole library in itself, is a type of magic. The play on the quote that appeals to me most is using its magic, specifically the arcane nature of it as something that is not capable of being understood by humans. That being a sufficiently advanced piece of technology isn’t capable of being grasped at all, might solve problems to questions we do not have, and is completely unknowable as to validity or truthiness. A computer which solves a prompt but the derivation is unknown in a human sense but a “magic” one.
In writing this above also thought of this, the copy paste programmer. There is some element of this for everyone but thinking on someone sitting down and solving a prompt, then someone copying that code completely or being heavily aided and distinguishing this. Reuse of code segments is how code was learned in books, especially early on. Painstakingly copying over line by line and avoiding a single error. The mechanism lost, but the end product producing “magical” result.
The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future - Gabe Newell, founder of steam
Hal Abelson- There’s a good part of Computer Science that’s like magic. Unfortunately there’s a bad part of Computer Science that’s like religion.
Mark Weiser’s The World is Not a Desktop
Take magic. The idea, as near as I can tell, is to grant wishes… I wish my computer would only show me what I am interested in. But magic is about psychology and salesmanship
and I believe a dangerous model for good design and productive tech. The proof is in the details - magic ignores them. Furthermore magic continues to glorify itself, as Robin Williams’
attention grabbing genie in Aladdin amply illustrates. Instead the future of computing is domineering, branded and boring.
Argument in favor of, sprinkled with connections of hardware and blending idea of computer use as using language/words to manipulate rocks with electricity. Circuit diagrams a type of sigil.
See one more thing I will say is how this choice is working, we don’t know. When we don’t know how the things are working we call it as magic, so this is magical now for us. Once we know how it is working it becomes a technique, right? It becomes logic. So today it is magic for us, so we have written a magical algorithm, tomorrow it will be procedural or have its own logic.
https://youtu.be/e2cF8a5aAhE?t=609 - Lecturer during NP-Hard and NP-Complete Problems lecture.
There is a framing possible here. Who determines the “magic”? The progression would be for the “wizard” to attempt to remove magic in source of a truth or understanding. For the onlooker, it will remain magic, the act of a Wizard.
So who first created the Wizard as a computer expert? Was it self described or did someone outside of the domain see it and deem it magic?
Via- https://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/12/18/programming-is-magic/
“Programmers Aren’t Wizards, you Narcissists”
Solid rant within strongly against
“The amazing thing about software creation is that… it’s this magical thing. You’re dealing with this arcane stuff.…manipulating symbols on this magical device that you are entering keys into and getting this mechanical thing to do magic for you, oftentimes across the planet….and not only are you using it to be powerful and exert some power over the world, but you’re using it to craft superpowers for other people too. You’re creating something that other people can then use to acquire some valuable capacity.”
This quote came from Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, at 2016’s Fullstack Fest. This grandiose opinion is a common perspective in Tech spaces. You can find hundreds, maybe thousands of think pieces and talks claiming that there is some mythical quality behind programming. Programmers have been described as unicorns, cyborgs, and so much more.
Yet this overinflation of programming’s importance leads to a problematic self-centering — one that blinds the tech industry to the interconnectedness of our world. Programmers often believe their labor to be so vital that they cut out everyone else in the process, allowing those with this mindset to do some pretty terrible things.
Listen, I don’t want people to walk away with the notion that all programmers are evil or ignorant (#notallprogrammers). We are not talking here about people on an individual level but a mindset, and one that has systemically perpetuated harm.
Truthfully every industry has people who speak verbosely about it. You should listen to some of the ways writers have described the act of writing — it’s almost biblical. As Stephen King once said: “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
What sets programmers apart is that right now, they are highly valued in our society and consequently are insulated from having to look at their labor as being interconnected with others. The average writer makes somewhere between 50 to 60 thousand dollars a year, and that only includes professional writers — not all the people doing gigs on the side. The average entry-level programmer makes tens of thousands more than that, which is higher for people in non-entry-level positions. A writer can call themselves a magician all they like, their not going to feel like one receiving less than $50,000 a year and burning the midnight oil to finish shit contracts.
It’s easy to feel like a wizard living in a financial bubble where you never have to be genuinely questioned, but programming isn’t magic. Every stroke of a keyboard requires the labor of thousands of people that do not receive the same recognition or pay as programmers. Your computer needed to be built, powered, and maintained. You needed to receive the food, care, and housing necessary to work it — not to mention the training. Remove anyone one of these steps, and it’s just a hunk of metal with a $1,000+ black mirror.
What you think of as magic is the result of thousands of hands that are part of an interconnected system of labor. A power plant goes offline. A system doesn’t get repaired. And that magical set of instructions sent halfway across the world is received by no one.
It was never all you. No one’s labor is ever solely theirs.
It’s important to point this out because many programmers have often supported systems that take advantage of everyone else’s labor. Much of the tech world’s wealth was built on applications with the sole purpose of extracting the value of others’ time and work.
Take the example of Facebook (now Meta), which advertised itself as a place of social connection but instead built platforms that everyone else had to go through, monetizing their users’ data in the process via ad targeting. These networks have had a massive impact on journalism, with newspapers’ ad revenue shrinking across the country. Whether or not you buy into the argument that “social media killed journalism” or just “the internet in general” did, it’s undeniable that sites like Facebook and Google have not helped. Where once papers reined supreme, many newspapers now have to pay Facebook directly to reach their readers. The application became a middleman designed to siphon off wealth from others.
Papers all over the world are now suing the company for this loss in revenue. The period before the Internet wasn’t perfect. Papers often were gatekeepers in their own right, but the legacy of social media sites has contributed to a system where a large percentage of Americans live in news deserts. They go to Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor for their local information, but these are not substitutes for ongoing reporting, and misinformation is rampant on them. Many Americans now know less about their communities than they did 15 years ago, before the dominance of these sites.
You can wax poetically about the magic of programming and the Internet all you like, but this is a way our lives have materially worsened because of it. And we, of course, have been narrowing down on one issue for the sake of brevity. From Amazon’s monopolization of the marketplace to the spread of disinformation, programmers maintain financial systems that have made everyone else’s life more precarious.
The “magic” of programming has done this. Programmers at big tech firms didn’t add capacity to newspapers and give journalists and others superpowers, but the opposite. Capitalists used programming to siphon the value of other industries for themselves. As Nitasha Tiku wrote in Wired:
“It is only now, a decade after the [2008/9] financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction — of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.”
The opinion that Juan and others are saying about programmers being magical beings isn’t just an exaggeration but a comfortable lie used to ignore the harm they are perpetuating onto the world.
For many, programmers aren’t wizards but parasites. They build digital tendrils that allow those on top to take and take until there is nothing left.
If you are a programmer and are still holding onto the idea that your labor is this magical force more special than the rest of humanity, then you are most likely contributing to this toxic system. You told yourself you were a wizard when you were really a plague.
And there is nothing magical about that.
Via: https://aninjusticemag.com/programmers-arent-wizards-795e47c4df58?gi=b54716faf436
Products
Piggybacking this point, tasteless products. In writing this I wondered to myself how I would feel wearing this, or being gifted this by someone who was well meaning. I can only see it as an ironic purchase.
“Software Developer a.k.a. Genius. Problem Solver. Thinker. Coffee Drinker. Night owl. Procrastinator. Magician.”
With text reflow this one ended with its own page, which seems justified. Take it in.
Further critique, interesting reception here (-3 points, snide reply)
Magic at its very fundamental is controlling the world via ritual expression of wishes. That’s pretty close to programming, I’d say.
The supernatural/natural dichotomy is more of a modern RPG theme than something a magic practitioner 300 years ago would have thought, or really one who practices what we would call magic today through ancient traditions.
Possible origins of Computer “Whiz”
Via https://www.etymonline.com/word/whiz
In computing, wizards were originally expert computer users (people) who could install software or help you with your installation. Later, they were software assistants (programs) to help with initial tasks of setting something up.
Further evidence from early years, early text such as the famous Jargon file - Hacker’s Dictionary (great book). I did find some magical references in the Jargon file.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/heavy-wizardry.html
](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/heavy-wizardry.html)
Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from deep magic, which trades more on arcane theoretical knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to X (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp.: found in source-code comments of the form “Heavy wizardry begins here”
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/deep-magic.html
[poss. from C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books] An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one neither generally published nor available to hackers at large (compare black art); one that could only have been composed by a true wizard. Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects of OS design used to be deep magic; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wizard.html
Transitively, a person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who groks it); esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is a hacker if he or she has general hacking ability, but is a wizard with respect to something only if he or she has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it.
The term ‘wizard’ is also used intransitively of someone who has extremely high-level hacking or problem-solving ability.
A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has wheel privileges on a system.
A Unix expert, esp. a Unix systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that ‘Unix Wizard’ is a recognized job title at some corporations and to most headhunters.
And an anecdote referring to magic,
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
Further timeline exploration
Human wizard
A wizard used to be a power-user, a programmer or someone with higher level of expertise.
Here’s a signature in a 1982 posting to net.general Usenet group:
ecvax!ittvax!qumix!gandalf
Al Chetham, System Wizard
Qume Corp
San Jose, CA
This is human wizard is defined in the Hacker’s Dictionary. From a 1982 edition posted to net.misc:
WIZARD n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or
hardware works; someone who can find and fix his bugs in an
emergency. Rarely used at MIT, where HACKER is the preferred term.
- A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary
people, e.g., a “net wizard” on a TENEX may run programs which
speak low-level host-imp protocol; an ADVENT wizard at SAIL may
play Adventure during the day.
This term was used right through the eighties and early nineties, and some software had a ‘wizard mode’, other software had a config file defining the username of the designated wizard. From comp.sources.games, 1990:
X First edit config.h according to the comments to match your system and
X desired set of features. Mostly you need to check the WIZARD option,
X make sure the HACKDIR is set properly, and check TERMLIB and COMPRESS.
A 1990 news.groups definition:
A true wizard is not only well-informed and experienced. She is also
gracious and generous. She patiently answers questions that lesser
beings might consider to be too “simple” or even “stupid” to bother
with.
Perhaps the step-by-step screens were named after these clever techies who could help us normal people set up those complicated systems. From the comps.emacs in 1988:
And we have no Emacs wizards, just users. I’m trying to get GNU Emacs 18.52
running on our ELXSI which recently had BSD 4.3 Unix installed.
People who weren’t wizards would have a hard time installing some software. From a 1982 post to fa.tcp-ip:
We are willing to give this software to anyone who wants
it, has a Unix source license, and will agree to a few constraints.
We should point out that it would be difficult for someone who is
not a Unix wizard to install this code. Unix wizards had their own newsgroup, comp.unix.wizards. A 1988 post suggests a tool for normal people: UTek’s sysadmin was not designed to allow doing selected root-ish things without allowing a root shell, it was meant to hold the hand of a non-wizard root who needs to install a new software package or whatever. … For the non-wizard types, something like sysadmin can be helpful. For most of the readers of this newsgroup, it is slow, and gets in your way.
A 1989 comp.os.vms suggested the role human wizards were in decline: (1) The knowledge won’t do them any good. We are long past the time when every computer installation had its wizard who knew (or thought he knew) how to fix every problem that might come up.
Other software wizards:
A 1989 post in comp.sources.misc uses wizard as another name for daemon, a little always-running process:
There used to be a machine called oz.ai.mit.edu, and it used to have a wizard who knew when it was your birthday. He was a friendly wizard, not at all deserving of the name “daemon,” because he’d send you a nice little note when that special day came around…
Software assistant wizard:
1992
Barrie England’s answer gives the earliest OED citation of the November 1992 MacUser magazine:
We’d like you to meet Wizards, step-by-step guides that are designed to walk you through complex tasks.
The earliest I found in Usenet is 31st January 1992, comp.windows.ms:
The last straw came with new MS apps such as MS Publisher. After swapping my screen resolutions a few times, some of the fonts in MS Publisher (especially Page Wizard displays/prompts) are now too small to be readable. Now MS Publisher does not have a PREV.FON. So how the heck do I get it to adjust for the resolution changes?
21st March 1992, comp.windows.ms:
I called up Microsoft and they are now taking order for Excel 4.0. The upgrade cost 111.45 including shipping and handling and will ship in one month. Some of the enhanced features are an icon bar like Word for Windows 2.0, also similar cut and paste ie. drag and drop features, an Ami Pro type movable icon block. Fill format something which enables formating like the fill down feature. A few more statistical functions, better translation of 123 Macros. And something called the Graphing Wizard which is supposed to make graphs even simpler to make. That’s all I could get from the sales rep. Anyone have more info. on this. ?
On 25th November 1992, Joel Spolsky, the Microsoft Excel Program Manager, said in comp.apps.spreadsheets:
Now you create a default scatter chart based on that using the charting wizard.
1993
Phillip Paxton explains these now-familiar software wizards on 8th Febraury 1993 in comp.os.ms-windows.apps:
I thought I was relatively familar with a lot of Windows apps, but just
today a friend told me about something called WIZARD. She described it
as a help system that teaches you how to use the software “as you type.”
She said she knew it worked with Excel, but she thought it was a
stand-alone app, implying that it works with other Windows apps.
Can anybody give me a clue about Wizard? Thanks in advance!
“Wizard”s are situation-specific code to help you accomplish a
specialized task. They were designed for MS Access, but several
other products were farther along in the development cycle, so
Excel, MS Works, (and some other product) actually beat Access
to the market to use them. There is another Microsoft Beta
product (Can’t mention due to NDA) which has wizards.
An example in Access is when you want to create a form or report.
Certain “styles” are predetermined and you can tell it which fields
you want to incorporate to this style and the form /report is prebuilt
to those specs. This is not poured concrete; i.e. once the wizard has
created the form, you can then make add’l modifications.
Add-on wizards is currently one of the hot areas for vendors
right now…
A 23rd February 1993 press release about Microsoft Visual C++ posted comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.misc in says:
Visual C++ features the popular wizard technology found in several of Microsoft’s other products, including the Microsoft Access database management system and Microsoft Excel. Two unique programming wizards AppWizard and ClassWizard act like programmers’ assistants by giving developers a jump start in creating a Windows-based application. AppWizard automates the first steps of using an application framework, making it easy to get started developing an application. Using a visually oriented application like the Microsoft Visual Basic programming system, the new AppStudio in Visual C++ lets programmers graphically create an application’s user interface, while the ClassWizard connects these user interface elements to C++ code.
And in more detail on 23rd March 1993 (comp.lang.c++):
The package consists of several tools; …
App Wizard - You start your programming here by specifying what your program
is (Windows .EXE, DLL, DOS .exe, VBX control etc..) a plethora
of options (Compile,Link,Precompiled Headers.) and what pieces
the Class libraries you will need (SDI, MDI, Pen, VBX Controls)
You also control certain BASE names of objects you inherit.Class Wizard - Here you connect code to screen objects and the messages
they generate. VC++ allows you to pick the object, then pick
messages you want to deal with and it writes a skeleton ()
for you to fill in. (What could be simpler :-) )Later
Wikipedia says the name was widespread and encouraged in the 2000s:
By 2001, wizards had become commonplace in most consumer-oriented operating systems, although not always under the name “wizard”. In Mac OS X, for example, they are called “assistants”; some examples include the “Setup Assistant”, which is run at initial bootup of the Macintosh, and the “Network Setup Assistant”, which has a similar function to the MS-Windows “New Connection Wizard”. GNOME refers to its wizards as “assistants”.
The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications (Version 3.0 [published on November 12, 2003]) urges technical writers to refer to these assistants as “wizards” and to use lowercase letters. In countries where the concept of wizard does not convey the idea of helpfulness or is offensive (via the suggestion that actual magic is being used), the manual suggests using the term “assistant” instead.
1991 OED antedatings
I found examples of a software assistant wizards before the OED’s earliest 1992 citation. In 1991, Microsoft release Publisher 1.0, that, according to a 2001 Microsoft article “pioneered Microsoft’s “wizards.”:
We realized early on that to make a mid-range desktop publishing program successful, we had to address the fact that a lot of people simply don’t have the design skills necessary to make a page look good,” says Ed Ringness, the original development lead for Publisher 1.0. “No matter how easy we made it to use the tools, people wouldn’t know what the tools were for. So the idea behind wizards was to get these people jump-started and do a lot of the design for them early on.”
Page Wizards were an ingenious and simple way to solve the conundrum. Using a set of document templates created by professional designers, the wizard guides users through the initial setup of their publication, such as a newsletter or brochure. Once the content is in place, the user is then free to modify the document however he or she wants.
There’s a handful of mentions of Page Wizards in magazines indexed by Google Books from 1991, the earliest I found is InfoWorld from 22nd July 1991 (Vol. 13, No. 29):
Publisher for Windows, expected to sell for under $200, will also be Microsoft’s first desktop publishing package. Publisher includes Page Wizard, a tool for building a page to user specifications, such as the number of columns and picture placement;
And InfoWorld from 5th August 1991 has a whole article on “‘Wizards’ make Microsoft applications smarter”:
Maples has described a similar technology several times in recent years and said more than two years ago that he hoped to ship applications containing the technology by the end of 1990. At that time Microsoft said a full-blown version of this technology would use multimedia to communicate with the user, such as through voice and perhaps a talking head. However, a common-denominator multimedia PC platform is not yet available.
Father and son
Rewinding back to this time, watch this interaction of a father not understanding his child using a computer. I’m cautious about what’s going on here because there could be a play at the father being a motivating actor here (view my prodigy), and there’s an interesting interaction at the end of the segment in which the kid encounters a problem and an adult “wizard” comes to take over.
Are Computer Programmers Future Wizards? Quora (yikes) topic following Gabe Newell Quote
https://www.quora.com/Are-computer-programmers-future-wizards
Software Wizards
Briefly, software Wizards. Is this term still used as frequently? Out of curiosity when writing this I went to google trends and there is a clear decline which I want to attribute to the rise of web as a platform, making wizards less prevalent (since web requires no installation) and other onboarding techniques are used.
“Software Wizard trends from 2004 onward”
Before the 1990s, “wizard” was a common term for a technical expert, like “hacker.”[4] The 1985 textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs was nicknamed the “Wizard Book”[5] for the illustration on its cover; its first chapter says, “A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit.”[6]
On Previous difficulty of installation of computer software
To understand why installers are called wizards today you need to know what it was like to install big software programs before we had wizards.
Sometimes an installation could be pretty straightforward. A simple unpacking of compressed files and sub-directories into a specific directory or sub. You don’t need a wizard for that.
But then people started making software that had multiple configurations. Other people started making software that made changes to how your operating system behaved. And yet more people started making software that needed to install its own support software first. And none of this was automatic or easy. It involved typing in specific commands and manually changing settings in your operating system prior to or after the install…or the software wouldn’t work.
Then, someone came up with the idea to create an interactive interface that presented these options and permission requests to the user during the installation. A few buttons and some check boxes, and PRESTO! you’re complex installation with all the configurations and customization you wanted are taken care of instantly, like magic.
And this step-by-step guideline process could be applied to more than just installations. It may surprise younger people, but sending a file to a printer and having that printer apply ink to paper in the fashion you expected was not always that easy. It was made easier with wizards, which hid away all the complicated configurations, asked you about the things that the average user was most concerned with, and then magically made everything work the way you wanted.
So why wizard, and not sorcerer, or warlock, or mage? Well, before wizards existed to automagically make software work simply and easily, the people who knew how to actually operate computers were often called wizards.
They were called wizards because wizard’s specifically are the men and women of fabled stories who read ancient tomes of arcane script and managed to extract the secrets of magic from them. No common man could simply read a spell-book. The terminology and symbols were as foreign as different language, and only the most intelligent could decipher them. Computer wizards read technical manuals and programming books during a time where the assembly language of computers was not a commonly understood or easily readable thing, and they unlocked the secrets of that language to harness the limitless power held within a microchip.
Physically wizard-like joke
Art
Garage music - “Oh My Days” sample at 1:56 - news reporter “Are you convinced that computers can only be used by mathematical and electronic wizards who go through life on an intellectual plane higher than your own? Are you sure the machine is about to explode” https://soundcloud.com/garageshared/oh-my-daze-glitch
Moebius art for the Alice computer system I’ve loved for a while. Holding an apple, levitating the actual device.
An aside on some books handling the topic. Some of which I own
The Wizbiz series: A fantasy series by Rick Cook, featuring Willian Irving Zumwalt, “Wiz”, a genius programmer who gets pulled into a world where magic works (called simply “World” by locals) to help defeat the southern order of magicians. There he discovers that magic spells and demons can be used like computer programs and single-handedly wins the war.
“The mythical man month” frederick brooks
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. […] The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
“Where Wizards Stay Up Late” - solid book about the early stages of the internet.
Unix Magic Poster by Gary Overcare
Magic 2.0 series by Scott Meyer
Martin Banks is just a normal guy who has made an abnormal discovery: he can manipulate reality, thanks to reality being nothing more than a computer program. With every use of this ability, though, Martin finds his little “tweaks” have not escaped notice. Rather than face prosecution, he decides instead to travel back in time to the Middle Ages and pose as a wizard.
What could possibly go wrong?
An American hacker in King Arthur’s court, Martin must now train to become a full-fledged master of his powers, discover the truth behind the ancient wizard Merlin…and not, y’know, die or anything.
Ra by qntm
Magic is real.
Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There’s magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It’s what’s next after electricity.
Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was.
And whether, indeed, she’s dead at all…
A picture quote from my reading of it,
The Laundry Files Series by Charles Stross
Their main character for the first five novels is “Bob Howard” (a pseudonym taken for security purposes), a one-time I.T. consultant turned occult field agent. Howard is recruited to work for the Q-Division of SOE, otherwise known as “the Laundry”, the British government agency which deals with occult threats. “Magic” is described as being a branch of applied computation (mathematics), therefore computers and equations are just as useful, and perhaps more potent, than classic spellbooks, pentagrams, and sigils for the purpose of influencing ancient powers and opening gates to other dimensions. These occult struggles happen largely out of view of the public, as the Laundry seeks to keep the methods for contacting such powers under wraps. There are also elements of dry humour and satirisation of bureaucracy.
It is also the go-to trusted name for independent computer fix experts “Tim the Computer Wizard” random example http://www.comp-wizard.com/
There exists a programming language called Magik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magik_(programming_language)#:~:text=Magik%20is%20an%20object%2Doriented,Geographical%20Information%20System%20(GIS)
“Automagically” (automatic magic) is a term frequently used, along with plain “magic”
In the context of computer programming, magic is an informal term for abstraction; it is used to describe code that handles complex tasks while hiding that complexity to present a simple interface. The term is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and often carries bad connotations, implying that the true behavior of the code is not immediately apparent. For example, Perl’s polymorphic typing and closure mechanisms are often called “magic”. The term implies that the hidden complexity is at least in principle understandable, in contrast to black magic and deep magic (see Variants), which describe arcane techniques that are deliberately hidden or extremely difficult to understand. However, the term can also be applied endearingly, suggesting a “charm” about the code. The action of such abstractions is described as being done “automagically”, a portmanteau of “automatically” and “magically”.
TODO On Glamours, touch up filters (noticing these on stars a lot more in films 4K blur filter vs seeing in real life)
Cyberpunk/Gaming
Cyberpunk is its own thing which can be a doc of its own. I do see it as one of those second order effects. Not even bothering to cover it. “The Matrix” is magic adjacent.
A magician, also known as an enchanter/enchantress, mage, magic-user, archmage, sorcerer/sorceress, spell-caster, warlock, witch, or wizard, is someone who uses or practices magic derived from supernatural, occult, or arcane sources
The Techno Wizard serves several important functions in a science fiction narrative, and they’re not even limited to that genre. Police procedurals like CSI: NY and Leverage make use of modern Techno Wizards. The hackers blurting out nonsense about firewalls and mainframes evolve into much more complex beings as technology evolves around them. When a writer needs to make the impossible possible in a realm without the slightest supernatural element, Techno Wizards have them covered. When they need someone to explain how the world works and what’s going on, the Techno Wizard is the perfect mouthpiece. Though their existence could be purely functional, many Techno Wizards have gone on to be beloved characters.
Via: https://gamerant.com/the-techno-wizard-trope-in-sci-fi-explained/
On gaming, which is a huge influence but hasn’t been mentioned as much. Gamers who are adept at computers can have an advantage in the competitive space. They can mod and bend the existing game to their will. Invoking cheat commands in the terminal will activate god mod, noclip or any other type of reality breaking gameplay.
WoW has the concept of macros, while not restricted to magic users, it does have a programmable aspect to it for mages and every top rank mage will have at least some kind of spell cast macro.
An example:
#showtooltip
/castsequence [mod:ctrl] reset=3 Mage Armor, Arcane Brilliance
/castsequence [mod:shift] reset=3 Molten Armor, Arcane Brilliance
/castsequence [@player] reset=5 Frost Armor, Arcane Brilliance, Ice Barrier, Slow Fall, Conjure Mana Gem
Game I found that interfaces with this directly is Code Spells. You actually design the spells using logic.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN5mQxX-Zd0
I looked into the origins of the game and it came from research. CodeSpells - Embodying the metaphor of wizardry for programming
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2462476.2465593
Current stack of the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEhAVz-Kpj0
At once dull and interesting, with declarations like “no infinite loops, no infinite lists” - the Code Spells competitive scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5T1jFj0DNg&list=PLZfqZ8S_29LELoFr9g3FXK5WRVSkiLtpD
Some “topic of the day” fluff to finish up. OpenAI prompts,
“Write a fable about a computer wizard” seems to spits out an EM Forster “The Machine Stops” summary
Joe Abercrombie Retirement Arc, excludes Bayaz analog though so case close.
Hackers – Wizards of the Electronic Age is a PBS documentary directed by Fabrice Florin filmed at the first Hacker Conference that took place at the Headlands Institute Conference Center in 1984. The conference was organized as a result of Steven Levy’s book ‘Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution’ published the same year. The documentary explores the cultural phenomenon that helped launch a multi-billion dollar computer industry and changed the way people live, communicate, work and play.
It features RMS.
https://anarchivism.org/w/Hackers_-_Wizards_of_the_Electronic_Age
From Rapaport Philosophy of Computer Science A heading 3.16.6 Is CS Magic?
The computing scientist could not care less about specific technology that might be used to realize machines, be it electronics, optics, pneumatics, or magic (Dijkstra)
To engender empath and create a world using only words is the closest thing we have to magic. (Lin Manuel Miranda)
The programmer like the poet only works slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air creating exertion of the imagination… yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words [or the magician’s spells] is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself… the magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be (Brooks, 1975) [https://www.mintbit.com/blog/computer-programming-modern-day-magic](https://www.mintbit.com/blog/computer-programming-modern-day-magic
A curious topic repeated across internet forums and social media is the uncanny parallel between programming and the occult.
To the uninitiated, the world of programming may appear like a labyrinth of cryptic runes and symbols. But, much like magic, this seemingly arcane language has the power to manifest intention, turning abstract ideas into concrete realities. A mere string of characters, properly arranged, compels machines to perform complex tasks, creating wonders that seem impossible to the outsider.
As one’s mastery deepens, so does the scale of possibility. In the hands of an adept, code can achieve feats that seem miraculous: communicating instantaneously across vast distances, peering into private realms, manipulating digital worlds, or even controlling physical objects remotely.
Magic numbers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)
Magic numbers are common in programs across many operating systems. Magic numbers implement strongly typed data and are a form of in-band signaling to the controlling program that reads the data type(s) at program run-time. Many files have such constants that identify the contained data. Detecting such constants in files is a simple and effective way of distinguishing between many file formats and can yield further run-time information.
Stumbled on Elf Magic while researching: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/153352/what-is-elf-magic
Palace
In early cybersex novel Virtual Spaces - Sex and the Cyber Citizen by Cleo Odzer, Cleo Odzer describes being given the role of a Wizard. This is a kind of moderator in the tech speak of the time, with chat moderation abilities. It sits below other archetypes in the moderator hierarchy such as Gods and sys-admins.
There’s also mention of @toading commands, which is the equivalent of a kickban, or the expulsion of the character from the game world. This word is a reference to the Wizard’s ability to transform humans into toads.
Wizards
wizard is an administrator of a MUD, MUSH, MUX, or MUCK. A wizard has the highest level of access to the world of a MUD and may be authorised to toad users (delete their accounts), authorize people to build on to the world, and get detailed information about who is connected to the system. They usually have full rights with respect to any integrated programming languages (see MUF). ProtoMUCK and its predecessor, GlowMUCK, support multiple wizard levels. Headwizards (W4) are the highest ranked staff and are generally the chief administrators of the MUCK. Archwizards (W3) and wizards (W2) have less permissions. Mages (W) are not normally counted as wizards. Rather, they are Helpstaff with additional permissions. Furscape, for example, is one MUCK that uses the multiple wizard levels provided by ProtoMUCK. Wizards may be well-known members of the community, use alts for roleplaying or other interaction, or in some cases (for example, Tapestries MUCK) wizards may be anonymous to protect their identities.