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>"There are four PostScript printers announced and demonstrated by three OEM vendors..." Brian Reid must have written this shortly before DEC announced its Pos
by markc 10y ago
>"There are four PostScript printers announced and demonstrated by three OEM vendors..."
Brian Reid must have written this shortly before DEC announced its PostScript printer.
I was involved in projects interrupted by PostScript's ascendancy - twice.
1) Circa 1984-85, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) Hardcopy I/O group was building a high-speed (40PPM) laser printer. The initial graphics language was GIDIS, a DEC proprietary graphics language. Mid-project, we had an abrupt change of direction. We were flown from Maynard, MA (helicopter to Logan!) to Adobe in Palo Alto to meet the team there, including Chuck Geschke, and got the lowdown on PostScript. Based on the meeting, we changed our bit-slice processor firmware from interpreting GIDIS to a single drawing primitive: draw-trapezoid. The Adobe PS interpreter spit out trapezoids and we rendered them. Worked quite well, though the change of direction killed our graphics interpreter development project which involved rather interesting algorithms for things like filling bound areas, Bresenham's line drawing algorithm, curve/ellipse rendering, pattern rendering, etc.
2) Shortly thereafter I was working on an Interpress interpreter for Intel 80286 at Compugraphic Corp. Somewhat hellish given the interpreter didn't fit in memory and there was no "virtual memory" so we needed to manually swap in/out memory segments. We had a Xerox Star for a compatibility reference standard. Fun toy. Along with our Apple Lisa, it was among the first WIMP interface machines I ever used. Mid-project the Interpress interpreter project was canned in favor of PostScript which was becoming dominant. Interpress was a very efficient byte-level encoding, but PostScript was much more interesting. As an HP calculator fan, I found the use of a stack and postfix fairly natural and I hand-edited a fair amount of PostScript for testing / debugging / experimentation.