On: Chuck Geschke has died

[protomyth]

Learning PostScript was a game changer for me. I am so grateful to the Adobe founders for not only the language but the documentation that accompanied it.

[tpmx → protomyth]

The tutorial/cookbook ("the blue book") from 1985, with a preface by Geschke:

https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF

[protomyth → tpmx]

This was such an amazing book. I had bought the paper copy and the page where they showed how to put text on a circle was amazing. It is so well written and easy to follow.

[tpmx → protomyth]

Reading it for the first time now, I get sort of the same kind of feeling that I got when I first read the K&R C book.

Was there a more affordable way of running PostScript code back then than buying a (1985) $6,995 Apple Laser Printer?

[protomyth → tpmx]

GhostScript was 88, Sun NeWS was 86ish, and Adobe Distiller was 1993. I had an Intel NeXTSTEP 3.3 machine in 95.

[tpmx → protomyth]

Did you/people in general think NeWs made sense, performance-wise? What was the general belief back then?

[protomyth → tpmx]

Don't know about NeWS, but Display Postscript was performant.

[tpmx → protomyth]

I guess I had just always assumed that NeWs was slow.

[protomyth → tpmx]

I think the performance of Display Postscript in OpenStep / NeXTSTEP was a indicator that NeWS didn't have to be slow. It would be interesting to have a version of it today to test.

[coldcode → protomyth]

I too learned Postscript in 1988 and also figured out how to construct documents in Illustrator's file format (which is a precursor to PDF) so I could export to it. Postscript was a lot of fun to work in (although debugging required some real imagination and lots of paper).

[protomyth → coldcode]

I had a machine running OpenStep, so it wasn't too bad to debug. Certainly used a lot less paper. I miss that old UI.