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.
Owen Densmore's work with Bill Atkinson and John Warnock on the Mac printing system, and his "linguistic motherboard" email and "Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility" white paper:
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.
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.
This is pretty sweet. I wonder if this is better than running pdf.js.
I just recently needed jbig2 image support in my web app and using pdf.js wasn't gonna work and be too slow and the wrong interface anyway, so I took the source code for the jbig2 decoder and vibe coded a converter that outputs 1 bit pngs. After some manual culling of code I got the wasm module down to 27kb with no glue.
postscript hacks are fun! the encryption on Type 1 fonts in 1987 was broken by Harvey Grosser, an ex-IBM System 360 coder, in Palo Alto. NeWS was bad NeWS to many, with a minuscule user base at its peak. Meanwhile, every print publication in existence was faced with "do or die" in digital production. Many ended with the latter, many years later.
People must really love PostScript!
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.
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=29295116
Owen Densmore's work with Bill Atkinson and John Warnock on the Mac printing system, and his "linguistic motherboard" email and "Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility" white paper:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827923
More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201231
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...
I just recently needed jbig2 image support in my web app and using pdf.js wasn't gonna work and be too slow and the wrong interface anyway, so I took the source code for the jbig2 decoder and vibe coded a converter that outputs 1 bit pngs. After some manual culling of code I got the wasm module down to 27kb with no glue.
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
The Interactive Encyclopedia System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interactive_Encyclopedia_S...
UniPress Emacs 2.20 (NeMACS) source code:
https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS
Here's the Emacs NeWS driver, a "C to PostScript" interface file:
https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/Trm...