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One thing I remember, that seemed right out of left field was Don basically compiling books. Postscript printers could often deliver more pages per minute mech

One thing I remember, that seemed right out of left field was Don basically compiling books. Postscript printers could often deliver more pages per minute mechanically than their processing could deliver. Lancaster showed how to basically compile and pre-process a book into a big postscript file that minimized the printer compute requirements. Load up an Apple //e machine with some respectable storage and it could deliver books on demand, printing at near max print speed. Damn cool.

kragen 6y ago
Later Adobe productized this. Originally it was called "PostScript Distiller", but then they introduced some incompatibilities with PostScript and renamed it "PDF".
- djmips 6y ago
  Fascinating. So PD in PDF came from Postscript distiller? All these years... I did not know that.
  - kragen 6y ago
    Sounds like an unanswerable question; it would be surprising if anyone reliably remembered earlier expansions for the initialism. Distiller remains an Adobe product.
    - jecel 6y ago
      The official name when PDF was launched as "Portable Document Format". I have no idea if that was a "backronym" for some internal project name.
      - kragen 6y ago
        Exactly.