4 ms·

> Slightly less malicious were a whole bunch of EPS files that would play havoc with your screen: "gravity", which would make all your windows drop to the botto

> Slightly less malicious were a whole bunch of EPS files that would play havoc with your screen: "gravity", which would make all your windows drop to the bottom of the screen, "black hole", etc. I was just searching for those on the USENET archives to point to them here. NeXTSTEP users would usually post to the USENET with NewsGrazer, and one of its options was to post (and view) "rich text" messages to the USENET in the form of a uuencoded tarball of an RTF directory, much to the consternation of non-NeXT users. This was immediately before the introduction of MIME, and Mark Crispin was quite vocal about how bad style this was. Anyway, I think it was Glenn Reid (maybe?) who started inserting these evil EPS attachments his Newsgrazer RTF postings, so you'd view his messages and your screen would melt, or all the icons in your dock would fall down. It was amazing. IIRC this seemed to be the impetus for NeXT to include a few security measures in their next Display Postscript revision, breaking all the fun. NeXT also had an open, unprotected port through which you could send Display Postscript commands, mostly to do remote screen stuff a-la X. I remember once posting about how I didn't think this was a big issue, and the next day someone mailed me the entire directory contents of my hard drive.

DonHopkins 10y ago
You could do a whole lot more window manipulation, user interface customization, event handling, object oriented programming, debugging, multithreaded programming and networking with the NeWS window system than with Display PostScript. At Sun in 1991, we wrote a NeWS window manager that not only supported advanced features implemented in PostScript, like tabbed windows and pie menus [1], panning across a large virtual desktop, switching between different rooms, plugging together all kinds of other extensions and gui toolkit customizations that could be applied to all NeWS applications (like globally replacing all linear menus with pie menus, or melting the screen [2], or watching your cursor with round eyeballs [3]), and framing arbitrarily shaped windows [4], but it could also wrap and manage all of your X11 windows, too. Plus it performed much better than any X11 window manager could, because it was running in the same address space as the window system, so didn't have to send asynchronous messages to the window manager, lock the input queue until it received a response from the wm, send asynchronous messages to the wm over the network, and switch context back and forth between the window server and the wm, as all X11 window managers must unfortunately do. [5] NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: + used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. + used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. + used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. Here's another example that was written 100% in NeWS PostScript, of the kind of thing that you just couldn't do in Display PostScript: The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines - October 1989 [6] The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS. Sun sold a PostScript printer called NeWSPrint, which used a sandboxed version of the NeWS server running on a Sun workstation as a rendering engine, sandboxed so you didn't have access to the file and networking operators. But I figured out a way to cause and catch an error with "stopped" that left some privileged code on the operand stack (PostScript is homoiconic, so code is data, like an executable array of operators), from which I was able to fish out a reference to the 'file' operator that could open sockets as well. So I made a small PostScript file you could print, which connected to the local "finger" daemon, and printed out a list of everyone who was logged in to the print server. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 [2] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.ps.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/me... [3] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye... [4] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/pizzatool.gif http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/pizzatool.gif [5] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast... [6] http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97 http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97
mikeash 10y ago
I don't have anything of substance to say here, but I just want to mention how delightful the phrasing of your last sentence is.

DonHopkins 10y ago

You could do a whole lot more window manipulation, user interface customization, event handling, object oriented programming, debugging, multithreaded programming and networking with the NeWS window system than with Display PostScript. At Sun in 1991, we wrote a NeWS window manager that not only supported advanced features implemented in PostScript, like tabbed windows and pie menus [1], panning across a large virtual desktop, switching between different rooms, plugging together all kinds of other extensions and gui toolkit customizations that could be applied to all NeWS applications (like globally replacing all linear menus with pie menus, or melting the screen [2], or watching your cursor with round eyeballs [3]), and framing arbitrarily shaped windows [4], but it could also wrap and manage all of your X11 windows, too. Plus it performed much better than any X11 window manager could, because it was running in the same address space as the window system, so didn't have to send asynchronous messages to the window manager, lock the input queue until it received a response from the wm, send asynchronous messages to the wm over the network, and switch context back and forth between the window server and the wm, as all X11 window managers must unfortunately do. [5] NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: + used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. + used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. + used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. Here's another example that was written 100% in NeWS PostScript, of the kind of thing that you just couldn't do in Display PostScript: The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines - October 1989 [6] The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS. Sun sold a PostScript printer called NeWSPrint, which used a sandboxed version of the NeWS server running on a Sun workstation as a rendering engine, sandboxed so you didn't have access to the file and networking operators. But I figured out a way to cause and catch an error with "stopped" that left some privileged code on the operand stack (PostScript is homoiconic, so code is data, like an executable array of operators), from which I was able to fish out a reference to the 'file' operator that could open sockets as well. So I made a small PostScript file you could print, which connected to the local "finger" daemon, and printed out a list of everyone who was logged in to the print server. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 [2] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/melt.ps.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/melt/me... [3] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye.ps.txt http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/eye/eye... [4] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/pizzatool.gif http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/pizzatool.gif [5] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast... [6] http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97 http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97

mikeash 10y ago

I don't have anything of substance to say here, but I just want to mention how delightful the phrasing of your last sentence is.