John Warnock's "linguistic motherboard" and Owen Densmore's "class.ps" smalltalk-like object oriented PostScript programming system, which NeWS and The NeWS toolkit used.
My boss, many years ago, talked about the time he programmed a printer to act as a web server using Postscript. I never asked what happened to other print requests while it was running.
There is an apocryphal story about some poor sys-admin who after spending several days trying to diagnose mysteries hangs in the new office laser printer. traced it to one user who was sending long print jobs that printed nothing. This enterprising engineer had to be told to knock it off after explaining how the new laser printer had the most powerful computer in the office and as such had rewritten some of his simulation code in postscript to run on the printer.
They were routed to the integrated time machine in PS, and sent to the year 2026 when they would be rendered in mobile phones, then the bitmaps would be sent back in time to your boss's printer.
Check out Don Lancaster’s tinaja archive, if it’s still around. He was quite enamored with NeXT style universal postscript and wrote at length about it.
PostScript was the first language I ever used professionally! :P
At the time, I worked for a printing house in Kyiv that specialized in accidental printing (screen printing, flexo-, tampo- etc. i.e. mostly printing on weird curved surfaces, not paper). The triad (full-color) screen printing was all the rage (early-mid 90s). Part of the process of generating the films that were later used to irradiate the polymer layer covering the screen mold was bound to a bootleg Scitex machines IDF used for printing maps. While we had the machines, we didn't have a proper driver that could take a color image, separate it into channels and instruct the machines to produce the films. So, I'd produce PS files from, eg. Photoshop (also bootleg...) and then edit the PS files by hand to match the requirements from the Scitex machines.
I wasn't a programmer by training, and doing all this stuff absolutely felt like magic. Something I will never experience with computers again :'(
The printer's jammed, give them some time.
Meanwhile, more about PostScript:
John Warnock's "linguistic motherboard" and Owen Densmore's "class.ps" smalltalk-like object oriented PostScript programming system, which NeWS and The NeWS toolkit used.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201231
My boss, many years ago, talked about the time he programmed a printer to act as a web server using Postscript. I never asked what happened to other print requests while it was running.
There is an apocryphal story about some poor sys-admin who after spending several days trying to diagnose mysteries hangs in the new office laser printer. traced it to one user who was sending long print jobs that printed nothing. This enterprising engineer had to be told to knock it off after explaining how the new laser printer had the most powerful computer in the office and as such had rewritten some of his simulation code in postscript to run on the printer.
They were routed to the integrated time machine in PS, and sent to the year 2026 when they would be rendered in mobile phones, then the bitmaps would be sent back in time to your boss's printer.
They were silently sent to the client browsers... ;-)
Thanks for posting this!
I've started looking into the history of Postscript because I was looking into the idea of "sending a program not a data structure".
Some thoughts so far: https://krishna.github.io/posts/send-a-program-not-a-datastr...
Check out Don Lancaster’s tinaja archive, if it’s still around. He was quite enamored with NeXT style universal postscript and wrote at length about it.
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I really liked developing in PostScript within NeWS... had quite a lispy interactive feeling to it.
It was perfectly usable on a early '90s Sun Workstation so I'd love to know what performance would be like on the vastly faster machines we have now.
PostScript was the first language I ever used professionally! :P
At the time, I worked for a printing house in Kyiv that specialized in accidental printing (screen printing, flexo-, tampo- etc. i.e. mostly printing on weird curved surfaces, not paper). The triad (full-color) screen printing was all the rage (early-mid 90s). Part of the process of generating the films that were later used to irradiate the polymer layer covering the screen mold was bound to a bootleg Scitex machines IDF used for printing maps. While we had the machines, we didn't have a proper driver that could take a color image, separate it into channels and instruct the machines to produce the films. So, I'd produce PS files from, eg. Photoshop (also bootleg...) and then edit the PS files by hand to match the requirements from the Scitex machines.
I wasn't a programmer by training, and doing all this stuff absolutely felt like magic. Something I will never experience with computers again :'(