It is always sad when someone dies, and especially so when that person was an inspiration for you. I met John at a party that I attended with my wife at PARC where he and Bob Taylor ("Boss Bob") were discussing microcode changes in the Alto that would speed up graphics rendering. As a young over confident pipsqueak I thought I could just wade into that conversation and add my thoughts but got so thoroughly trounced (but in a nice way) I just had to nod and slowly slink away :-). While hanging out with my wife another attendee came up to me and assured me that no, neither Bob nor John were being mean, they just had already covered a lot of the basics and options and their questions were at a much higher level. He assured me I'd catch up, just takes a bit of reading. I said thanks, feeling a bit better but really still feeling like the third grader who finds themselves in a college physics class.
When we got home my wife asked me what Bob had said to me, I explained that he and John and pretty much explained that I didn't know enough about graphics algorithms yet to engage in their discussion. She said, "No, not Bob Taylor, Bob Sproul."
Alan Kay said Bob Taylor found a way to get all these "lone wolves" to work together. Did you see anything like this at PARC?
Why are you and other big names hanging out at HN? I thought Quora (and occasionally Reddit) attracted the big names. (I'm not complaining. I just thought people of your stature had their own "exclusive" watering holes on the Internet ;)
I am not a "big name" :-). I am more like the Woody Allen character who shows up in the crowd at a lot of famous events with famous people.
And to clarify, I did not work at PARC, my wife worked as Xerox Business Systems which was co-located with PARC and there was a lot of intermingling. I was at Intel when we moved here, then joined Sun.
>Owen Densmore recounted John Warnock’s idea that PostScript was actually a “linguistic motherboard”. (This was part of a discussion with Owen about NeFS, which was a proposal for the next version of NFS to run a PostScript interpreter in the kernel. More about that here:)
>Window System? ..NeWS ain’ no stinkin’ Window System!
-or-
Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility, by Owen Densmore, Sun Microsystems, NeWS Team
>Introduction
>NeWS is difficult to understand simply because it is not just a window system. It is a “Swiss Army Knife” containing several components, some of which contribute to its use as a window system, others which provide the networking facilities for implementing the client-server model, all embedded in a programmable substrate allowing extremely flexible and creative combination of these elements.
>During the initial implementation phase of the Macintosh LaserWriter software, I temporarily transfered from Apple to Adobe working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers. At lunch one day, I asked: “John, what do you plan to do after LaserWriter?” His answer was interesting:
>PostScript is a linguistic “mother board”, which has “slots” for several “cards”. The first card we (Adobe) built was a graphics card. We’re considering other cards. In particular, we’ve thought about other network services, such as a file server card.
>He went on to say how a programmable network was really his goal, and that the printing work was just the first component. His mentioning using PostScript for a file server is particularly interesting: Sun’s next version of NFS is going to use PostScript with file extentions as the client-server protocol!
Thanks for that. I found this exchange quite a stark difference from the "wisdom" of the Paypal Mafia:
WARNOCK: Oh, I’ve always liked mathematics; problem solving has always been fun. My saving grace in life is that I was not introduced to computers at an early age.
INTERVIEWER: Why wouldn’t it help to learn about computers earlier?
WARNOCK: I went through the university, all the way to the master’s level, so I got a good, solid liberal education. I believe it’s really important to have a very solid foundation in mathematics, English, and the basic sciences. Then, when you become a graduate student, it’s okay to learn as much as you can about computers.
Good lord, I forgot about Cringely. I still remember the spot illustration of a frog in a business suit on his site that I later found out he got from a Dover Illustrations clip art book (probably cam originally from Punch or another old English mag)
When John's co-founder Chuck Geschke died a couple of years ago there was a similar thread posted here [0] and someone in the comments mentioned this 2011 CMU lecture by Chuck, "The Adobe Story", which was a pretty great overview of their work and mission: https://youtu.be/apHqb0V3VAM
> It's incredibly insightful, full of personal stories from his time at Xerox PARC, under the leadership of Robert Taylor, working with Butler Lampson and so much more about the founding of Adobe and Silicon Valley in general.
Thanks I even searched for this on YouTube and couldn’t find the link to the edited talk. Here’s another one he gave talking about the development of PostScript: https://youtu.be/DyXiC-MSzwU
I still remember the day I met John Warnock as if it was yesterday.
John's humility, despite his monumental success, taught me to always keep my feet on the ground. His vision inspired me to push boundaries in software development. But above all, it was his passion that kindled a fervor within me to harness technology for change.
John Warnock's passing is a massive loss for the tech world. My heart goes out to his loved ones during this time. His legacy, however, will continue to shape the industry, inspiring countless others just as he had inspired me. Goodbye, Mr. Warnock. You will be missed.
it took me many decades to decode the economics of the intense Desktop Publishing era.. as far as I can see, Apple made hardware, requiring long lead times, large cash reserves, deep industrial secrets.. while Adobe made software and intellectual property, which was fundamental to the written word, changed the entire publishing world, but was copied without paying Adobe. The ecosystem of developers, business and small business around the publishing world, was watched by every literate eyeball, but did not have a transaction model that made Adobe money. Apple in comparison, made plenty of money on each new sale of hardware, but the infrastructure to do that was huge and expensive.
When Apple turned on Adobe, over and over again, I did not understand how "Apple bites the hand the feeds it" .. Adobe was a likable brand. Of course, Microsoft betrayed and undermined Apple not repeatedly, but as often as possible, inventing new ways to do it with vigor. No review is possible without mentioning the day that Apple, Microsoft and Adobe were on stage at a trade show, and Apple+Microsoft announced the TrueType standard, and John Warnock literally wept in front of thousands with the shock and betrayal of it.
very strange days indeed
RIP John Warnock, bright intellect, inventor, leader
> When Apple turned on Adobe, over and over again, I did not understand how "Apple bites the hand the feeds it" .. Adobe was a likable brand.
It was no Quark, but Adobe was never a likable brand, and has always been as much (if not more) of a monster as Apple.
Remember that TrueType was an Apple/Microsoft response to Adobe's behavior around Adobe's monopoly on core desktop publishing technologies. The reason Warnock was on the verge of tears at Seybold in 1989 is because he was forced to compromise on price and terms to keep PostScript on LaserWriters.
Usually the hardware makers are the first to profit after a revolution, but then the next biggest thing in the stack (software) makes 10x the money.
In the 1990s Cisco and the ISPs were the biggest internet companies, then it quickly moved to yahoo and google, then mere websites (Facebook, Twitter etc).
Methinks apple and Microsoft just bullied Adobe and kept them down.
Saddened to hear of John Warnock's passing. His co-founding of Adobe and co-designing PostScript had an impact on solutions I designed and implemented in the beginning of my professional programming career. In the early 90s, I extensively used PostScript for reporting solutions on a bespoke Construction Support System which were used for designing and assembling trains and trams.
Those days, working with FORTRAN and PostScript, were foundational for me. To this day, the reference books from that era hold a place on my bookshelf:
Adobe practically saved the Mac from an early grave.
Desktop publishing was the only killer app for GUI in the late 1980s. Adobe PostScript was a truly genius piece of software that enabled even the relatively low-powered Mac to become a DTP workstation. And of course Warnock was a co-inventor of PostScript.
I learned PostScript in 1988 by studying the Illustrator file format (which eventually became the basis of PDF). It seemed like something from the future given how unavailable high-resolution graphics were at the time. Without Pagemaker + PostScript Apple would have gone under much sooner, and never would have become what it is now. At the same time learning PostScript with reams of paper and basically no tools was a giant pain in the ass.
My father taught himself postscript in the late 80s (it was on the Mac SE). With it and Microsoft Word with a "secret" PostScript style (a particular combination of font, size, italics, underlining, and hidden) allowed him to create a high quality header for a Microsoft Word doc.
With it, copied that document and printed it and the university's letterhead was nicely at the top - scaled to any size. It worked just as well on 8x10 as it did on cardstock that was to be sent out.
It cut down on the cost for printing for the department because they didn't have to buy as much of the letterhead pre-printed paper. Saved on time too since you just printed it rather than needing to load one special sheet and then print the rest.
He saved the stack of paper that he used to learn with for a while. Got four tests per page (four edges and flip). The red book for PostScript laid on top of it.
That brings back memories. I did almost exactly the same thing, but I created a Postscript program to render a "Common Seal" stamp, that through some process unknown to me could be converted from the printout to an actual stamp. It was all circular, the text was rendered on a path (a circle) and automatically scaled to fit. I used a lot of paper writing that, I went a little further and moved the image to different positions on the page so I could get more than four tests on a page, but still a large amount of paper in the end. I'd forgotten about the Microsoft Word special style that made it all possible.
So when I got to use a NextStation with Preview.app, that was a huge revelation, interactive postscript.
Jobs is the reason PostScript was on the printer in the first place. If Jobs hadn't wanted PostScript, or if Warnock hadn't licensed PostScript to Apple, Jobs would've ignited the desktop publishing revolution with another page description language.
You could just as well say that if Jobs hadn't decided that Apple should build the LaserWriter, Warnock would have ignited the DTP revolution with another computer company.
GEM and Windows were nibbling at the heels of Apple already. Then you had Sun and others at the high end. PostScript was so advanced that it was further ahead of the competition in its field than Apple was in the GUI market.
I'm actually surprised he didn't rate a black bar.
In any case, Postscript was probably one of the most important technologies of the last century. It afforded some major-league stuff.
Funny story: I had an engineer that reworked a vignetting algorithm (image processing module), to be about 100X faster. He wrote the spec for it in pure Postscript. The example illustrations were actually Postscript, executing his algorithm.
I wrote as PS exporter for a 3D sci-viz system in the early 90s. It generated an implementation of Warnock's algorithm for 2D rendering, using a recursive decomposition of 3D primitives, implemented in the stack-based PS programming language.
The cool thing was that some parameters to control the rendering were used in the plugin at runtime for file generation (to control file size), but others were written into param declarations in the PS header for execution at print time.
PS is text, so you could manually tweak values for the speed-fidelity trade-off at print time, long after after the file was generated.
Want to spend 30 minutes rendering to A0 without any depth artifacts? Just change a number in the file header.
Nearly half a century ago, a visualization tool for a port (!) morphed into an interpreter for laser printers:
"The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 by John Gaffney at Evans & Sutherland, a computer graphics company. At that time Gaffney and John Warnock were developing an interpreter for a large three-dimensional graphics database of New York Harbor." (Wikipedia)
I read about this also in some book (Coders at Work?), and was surprised it did not originate from the graphics design community, although Warnock's wife is a graphics designer. Adobe wasn't named after a habor, but after the little creek behind Warnock's home in California, apparently.
Funny dual meaning here. "The RIP" (pronounced as a word) is what they called the PostScript unit on a high end imagesetter like a Linotronic or Agfa. It stands for Raster Image Processor.
John was a good dude. Brilliant, and the type of leader that was good to work for as an engineer, because he believed the engineering was the point of it all.
> Warnock's wife is a graphics designer
The story I always heard about Illustrator is that it started out as a program he wrote for her to make editing PostScript art easier. She also designed the original green Adobe logo, which the current red A logo is derived from.
> Funny dual meaning here. "The RIP" (pronounced as a word) is what they called the PostScript unit on a high end imagesetter like a Linotronic or Agfa. It stands for Raster Image Processor.
I'm happy to say the usage lives on in RIPs small and big, from wide format printers to digital offset presses.
* human capital would improve as the most skilled wouldn't become feeble and die, and would instead see their skills continue to improve
* quality of life would massively improve as far fewer people would suffer the tragedy of permanently losing loved ones, and would be saved from the ravages of aging and the anguish of an impending death. Saying nothing about the vastly deeper and greater experiences that much longer lifespans would impart.
By world, you mean the environment, due to population growth? By that logic, we should reduce healthcare spending to reduce life expectancy, and with it, the human population.
I am pro-humanity, so I want to end death for all people. The problems of overpopulation can be addressed through other means.
Agreed. Most (but not all) old people have trouble letting go of old ideas. I can't imagine old powerful people keeping old ideas alive for hundreds of years.
Young people can create their own spaces, where old people can't exert influence. No need to murder old people, or deny them lifesaving technologies, just to get your experimental spaces.
Also, plenty of old people want to explore new ideas and join these experiments, and if they knew they had more time, possibly many more would too.
It's the people who don't believe in the potential of humanity, and thus want to keep human life limited, who seem to lack vision and be stuck in their cynical, rigid mindsets.
NeXT used display PostScript as it's graphics language. When apple was working on OS X they wanted to continue, but we're worried about adobe licensing costs, and so ultimately went with PDF instead
Sad news. Like many I'm sure, one of my first magical experiences with computers was printing a color gradient on a Laserjet printer. Hard to overstate what an influence Adobe's products have had not just on the industry, but society as a whole.
Say what you want from Adobe's rent-seeking practices, but it's a company that created some of the first, most important real-world applications for personal computers. With Postscript and Photoshop, Adobe revolutionized, if not created, new industries.
Adobe PostScript, invented by Warnock, was _the_ standard. It was the means by which an application could describe to the computer in the printer the layout of the page. (And later the compute resources in the printer got separated first into Raster Image Processors (RIPs) and later just part of printer drivers in the computers).
The development of PDF was driven by the need to resolve incompatibilities in PostScript implementations that had become the nightmare of graphics pros in the early 90s. It was not uncommon to have to use random software to convert one PS file to another PS file which could be understood by the RIP owned by a given print shop.
Quark was built on the infrastructure enabled by PostScript in the first place.
Edit to add: possible confusion - RIPs were primarily used to generate super high res output on film used for lithographic plates, but they were enabled by the standardization around PostScript for driving laser printers.
>>The modern world would barely operate without PDF.
PDF was great when most documents needed to be printed, so sending say an invoice to someone you could ensure their printed copy was the same as your printed copy.
PDF in "modern" world, where printing is less important and really should be sent to the dust bin if history. PDF has become a complex web of security problems, screen compatibility problems, and various other things including the complex web of converters to take PDF's and make them back into something editable / usable.
We need a replacement for PDF, and let PDF go away along with the printer
I get what you are saying. But in a world where most websites looks different on every different browser and browser size and with constantly-changing content, it can be refreshing to have a PDF that whose context is fixed and you know is going to be laid out the same anywhere.
> PDF was great when most documents needed to be printed
Actually PDF still rules the roost.
Any professionally printed thing you see, whether as small as a humble corporate business card, or as large as a billboard will have been provided to the print shop as a PDF.
In the past, you would have had to send the DTP file and all the accompanying assets, including the font if you were using a non-standard font.
Now you just send the print shop a PDF. Job done. Its a win-win for both parties.
>PDF in "modern" world, where printing is less important and really should be sent to the dust bin if history.
If you do any kind of business at all, especially the accounting side of things, printing is still a hard requirement and PDF makes all that practical.
>>especially the accounting side of things, printing is still a hard requirement
That is provably false, lots of businesses have gone paperless, and all (at least for the US) government agencies, courts, etc all fully accept erecords, many preferring it.
For most documents that are published as PDF nowadays, there is only little practical use for them to have a predetermined pagination and layout, and a free-flowing layout would be perfectly fine. If PDF didn’t exist, those documents might instead be typically published in a format more akin to EPUB or MOBI.
> Maybe. But maybe people would have simply adopted other standards, like djvu.
Some people still insist on using non-PDF, for example the Swiss tax office insists on some weird proprietary format[1], QDF made by some obscure company called Snapform. All their forms are in QDF format.
It introduces completely un-necessary friction into the process. Everyone knows they should have just used PDF. Instead of forcing people to install some reader software they will never use for any other purpose.
What are these? Adobe provides a large amount of value to the graphics industry and charges a fee for that. People buy it if they want or don't if they don't. I fail to see any rent seeking (seeking to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth to the society).
Very funny, Don, but I mean focusing on the rigid constraints of paper rather than the fluid screen environment is to focus on early 20th century technical constraints rather than the future.
This when receiving a link to a pdf on your phone the natural action is to ignore it and do something else.
PDF on small handheld devices, or most landscape-oriented desktop screens, is suboptimal.
What I've found over going on three years using a large-format (13.3") e-ink tablet, however, is that PDFs oriented toward documents from roughly octavo to A4 / US Letter formats is what I strongly prefer to free-flowing formats, most especially HTML, but also ePub, so long as the PDFs are sensibly formatted.
Free-flowing formats end up requiring scolling, critical elements (tables, graphics, and images) frequently span viewport boundaries requiring repositioning, and font choices and rendering are often poorer than for PDFs.
It turns out that book and standard paper formats evolved toward the sizes we're accustomed to because they suit the ergonomics of reading and handling well. Mobile phones' core constraint is to fit into a pocket or purse, which tends to be smaller than a full-form book or magazine. It's not so much that PDFs are ill-suited to them as that mobile phones are poor formats for reading full stop.
Yes, PDFs can be poorly formatted and all that jazz, but so can HTML docs (and far more frequently), or ePubs. My principle remaining complaint is that tools for organising and managing a substantial electronic document library are ... exceedingly poor, in most cases. Though that's independent of the document format used.
Seriously, I think PostScript's predecessor Interpress and its successor PDF were more focused on "the rigid constraints of paper" and printed page and document structures than PostScript was.
With NeWS, instead of paper, we drew on overlapping arbitrarily shaped nested scaled clipped canvases, and never used the "showpage" operator or DSC (Document Structuring Conventions) or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) comments when using PostScript to draw trees of user interfaces components (like Open Look and PSIBER) and interactive zooming applications and visualizations (like the drawing editor in HyperLook, and the zooming scrolling animated SimCity maps and sprite overlays and graphs).
PDF is more constrained and document/page structure focused that free form PostScript even with DSC/EPS, as were Interpress and JaM.
I always thought it was a bold move to name a page description language for laser printers "JaM" (the predecessor to Interpress).
Brian Reid touched on (or rather dove deep into) it when he described the different approaches JaM and Interpress and PostScript had to structure and semantics. The whole article is fascinating, but I'll quote the relevant parts:
>There is, however, a crucial difference between the PostScript and
Interpress naming schemes that makes them very different, and makes
impossible the above-mentioned imagined compiler to translate
PostScript into Interpress. That difference is best understood as a
semantic difference, and will be explained in the next section.
>Returning to syntactic issues, an Interpress file has what is called
"static structure" or "lexical structure". This means that you can
look at an Interpress file and make structural assumptions about what
you find there. For example, an Interpress file is defined to be a
sequence of "bodies"; each body is a sequence of operators and
operands. The first body is the "preamble", or setup code; all
following bodies correspond to printed pages. If an Interpress file has
11 bodies, then it will print as 10 pages.
>By contrast, a PostScript file has no fixed lexical structure; it is
just a stream of tokens to be processed by the interpreter. PostScript
prints a page whenever the SHOWPAGE operator is executed. If a
PostScript file contains a loop from 1 to 10, with a SHOWPAGE operator
inside the loop, then it will print 10 pages even though there is only
one actual call to SHOWPAGE in the file. However, since PostScript is a
textual language, and since it has a "comment" facility like the C
/..../ or Pascal {...}, it is possible for the creator of a
PostScript file to represent whatever additional information is desired.
It is a slight misnomer to call this a comment facility, because the
normal use of the word "comment" in programming languages implies
that the contents of the comment are irrelevant. PostScript comments
are irrelevant in the sense that they do not affect the image produced
by a PostScript file, but they do convey machine-readable information
about the structure of the document.
>A PostScript client is free to choose any structuring scheme that he
wants, and the tool that he has available to implement this
structuring scheme is the PostScript comment. There is a particular
"standard" structuring convention documented along with PostScript
by which page boundaries and other lexical information can be marked.
A PostScript file that follows that convention is called a
"conforming" file, but it is a convention and not a rule; the
printed image produced by a nonconforming PostScript file will be
identical to that produced by the equivalent conforming PostScript
file. Conversely, the structure of a PostScript file, as represented
by the structuring convention, is completely independent of the
appearance of the page images--the actual PostScript text appears to be
a series of comments as far as the structuring systems are concerned.
>The technique of mixing two different languages in one file, so that a
processor for one language sees the text of the other language as
comments, is not new. Perhaps the most widely-known instance of this
scheme is Don Knuth's "WEB" system, in which Pascal and TEX are
woven together in such a way that the Pascal program looks like a
comment to the TEX interpreter and the TEX source looks like a
comment to the Pascal compiler.
>This absence of fixed lexical structure in PostScript is a two-edged
sword. On the one hand, it offers more flexibility in creating page
images, especially repetitive ones; on the other hand, it provides more
opportunities to make mistakes.
[...]
>An Interpress file consists of a series of bodies. Each body is
executed completely independently of each other body. In particular, at
the beginning of each page body, the execution environment is restored
to the state that it had at the end of execution of the preamble, so
that each page body is executed as if it were the only page in the
document. There is absolutely nothing that the code in one Interpress
page can do that will have any effect on the execution of the code in
any other Interpress page, and the Interpress language guarantees that
independence. This permits, for example, the pages to be executed or
printed in any order, front to back or back to front, or in folios of
16 pages at a time, with complete confidence that the appearance
of the pages will not change.
>By contrast, a PostScript file has no static structure, so there is no
convenient place to build automatic firewalls. PostScript provides,
instead, two pairs of operators by which a PostScript user can build
his own firewalls wherever he wants them. There is an operator called
SAVE, and another operator called RESTORE. The RESTORE operator
restores the execution state of the machine back to what it was when
the last SAVE operator was executed. Thus, if a PostScript user wants
to have pages that are firewalled against each other, then he puts a
SAVE operator at the beginning of the page and a RESTORE operator at
the end of the page. If the PostScript user wants to play tricks, and
build PostScript files that do bizarre things with the execution state
between pages, he is free to do so by leaving out the SAVE and RESTORE.
>By now you can probably see the fundamental philosophical difference
between PostScript and Interpress. Interpress takes the stance that the
language system must guarantee certain useful properties, while
PostScript takes the stance that the language system must provide the
user with the means to achieve those properties if he wants them. With
very few exceptions, both languages provide the same facilities, but in
Interpress the protection mechanisms are mandatory and in PostScript
they are optional. Debates over the relative merits of mandatory and
optional protection systems have raged for years not only in the
programming language community but also among owners of motorcycle
helmets. While the Interpress language mandates a particular
organization, the PostScript language provides the tools (structuring
conventions and SAVE/RESTORE) to duplicate that organization exactly,
with all of the attendant benefits. However, the PostScript user need
not employ those tools.
>Before taking a stand on this issue, you must remember that neither
Interpress nor PostScript is engineered to be a general-purpose
programming language, but rather to be a scheme for the description of
page images, so it is not necessarily valid to apply programming
language lore to these two systems.
Yes, and Brian Reid and Glenn Reid, who wrote the Adobe PostScript "Green Book" aka "PostScript Language Program Design", and "Thinking in PostScript", the PostScript "The Distillery", and "TouchType" for the NeXT, are brothers!
>Glenn Reid wrote a PostScript partial evaluator in PostScript that optimized other PostScript drawning programs, called "The Distillery". You would send still.ps to your PostScript printer, and then send another PostScript file that drew something to the printer. The first PostScript Distillery program would then partially evaluate the second PostScript drawing program, and send back a third PostScript program, an optimized drawing program, with all the loops and conditionals unrolled, calculations and transformations pre-computed, all in the same coordinate system.
>Around 1990, Glenn Reid wrote a delightful original "Font Appreciation" app for NeXT called TouchType, which decades later only recently somehow found its way into Illustrator. Adobe even CALLED it the "Touch Type Tool", but didn't give him any credit or royalty. The only difference in Adobe's version of TouchType is that there's a space between "Touch" and "Type" (which TouchType made really easy to do), and that it came decades later!
>Brian's brother Glenn Reid was also very active in the PostScript world, he worked for Adobe (Illustrator), Apple (iMovie) and Fractal Design (Painter, Dabbler, Poser), and NeXT (Interpersonal Computing).
Brian Reid also published the Usenet Cookbook, maps of Usenet in PostScript, and wrote the story about "The Mother of All Grease Fires" that almost happened outside of where he worked at DECWRL (DEC Western Research Laboratories in Palo Alto).
I was aware of Eric's Usenet activity / participation reports, which are included in John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, a very early 1990s survey of "computer networks and conferencing systems" (it predates the WWW).
I think I was vaguely aware of his work on Scribe though that had slunk off into dark recesses of my brain (which is to say, most of it). Given my interests in documents and their specification & management, Scribe's been something I've meant to look at more closely, so this is a handy reminder, and I appreciate the further context.
I often wish we'd have the computing future you guys envisioned. Your work on pie menus alone is incredible, and the demo of NeWS is still mind blowing all these years later
Flash was already quite popular when Adobe acquired Macromedia. I knew of at least one "Flash competitor" project that fizzled out internally before they decided to buy.
Hey @dang, I have a simple feature request. Can we have the black bar the the top link to the relevant thread? The story isn't always at the top of the front page and it's annoying having to look through the list to find what it's for.
The black bar is a simple gesture of respect. The fact that we’ve been losing a lot of important tech people doesn’t diminish the tradition. If anything, it reinforces it.
I see absolutely no reason we should stop. Is it really an inconvenience to have a simple black bar at the top of the page to act as a reminder?
The black bar is not "a simple gesture of respect" — if it was, it would never disappear. It's a sign of mourning over the passing of someone whose contributions were extremely influential to the high-tech industry, and who is/was widely known for their contributions.
> I see absolutely no reason we should stop.
Neither do I; nor do I think we should be doing that on a daily basis.
If you place the dawn of the computer era (in terms of more than, say, 1000 people working in the field) sometime in the 1950s, and the youngest of those people were 20 when they began, we are now reaching the point where even the oldest of those people are dead or about to die.
Broad demographics are regular, but we're sliding into the period where "the first 10,000 people to make a living from working with computer technology" are all going to be dead or about to die. That's a sort of unique inflection point.
If you also reflect on the fact that a lot of the computer technologies that impact people the most today were developed in the 1970s-1990s period, this becomes even more so.
I understand that these were inflection points, but I was assuming that there would be others on new fields. Maybe less virginial than first processors / OSes / editors / photo editing etc but still pionneers on their domain.
When we got home my wife asked me what Bob had said to me, I explained that he and John and pretty much explained that I didn't know enough about graphics algorithms yet to engage in their discussion. She said, "No, not Bob Taylor, Bob Sproul."