Comment by WillAdams

The Adobe philosophy on not implementing page protection would pretty regularly cause some _spectacular_ problems/bugs --- in particular, I can recall one ill-formed .eps file which somehow disabled the new page mechanism and was supposed to re-enable it, and which when placed after a different .eps which had some code which interfered w/ said re-enabling, would cause the document to stop generating new pages, instead overlaying each successive page on top of the previous one.

One of the longest days of my life was generating a press-ready PDF using a beta of a then-new program called "pdftex" which would validate for the "Thomson Techno Task Force"'s standard... tried _every_ possible combination of printer drivers, PDF applications, and settings to learn that Adobe Acrobat would _not_ work, but Adobe Acrobat Reader would, that the printer driver had to be Apple's LaserWriter 8.6 (not the Adobe driver or some other LW version), and that the .ps file had to be PS Level 2 (not 3), but that "Generate Level 3 Page Semantics" had to be checked on.... over a quarter of a century since and that memory is still seared in my otherwise uncertain organic memory.

Naturally, this is all interwoven w/ the early history of the Macintosh and LaserWriter --- a couple of relevant stories on folklore.org

- https://www.folklore.org/Origins_of_Spline-Based_and_Anti-Al...

- https://www.folklore.org/The_End_Of_An_Era.html

It's also notable that Display PostScript was largely developed by folks at NeXT such as Mike Paquette.

Anyone who is interested in PostScript should definitely get "The Green Book" by Glenn Reid (_PostScript Language Program Design_) as well as his wonderful _Thinking in PostScript_.

That said, my wife's aunt oversaw one of the largest Xerox Alto/Star networks in the U.S. Government, and when we would chat, her stories would all be about how well things worked and how easy it was to manage (aside from getting funding), while mine were all stories about fixing weird problems...