[HN Gopher] John Warnock has died
___________________________________________________________________
John Warnock has died
Author : skilled
Score : 384 points
Date : 2023-08-20 08:36 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| herodotus wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Apple's Core Graphic engine is in fact an
| implementation (in C) of Postcript. Warnock's legacy is truly
| foundational.
| paradox460 wrote:
| 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
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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
| hasmanean wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _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.
| rvz wrote:
| RIP Warnock. Black bar for this legend please.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Suggestion: black bars should be clickable to bring to a
| relevant post.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Off topic but so many heroes of tech (so to speak) are old now
| perhaps it's time to retire the black bar
| agumonkey wrote:
| hard to say, demographics are regular and we will always have
| waves of pioneers dying .. I don't know
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| chongli wrote:
| 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?
| maratc wrote:
| > The black bar is a simple gesture of respect.
|
| 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.
| lnalx wrote:
| 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.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Warnock also co-created the PostScript page description language,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript
|
| RIP John Warnock.
| jl6 wrote:
| /RIP (John Warnock)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
|
| The folks in Japan defecated masonry over that.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I'm actually surprised he didn't rate a black bar
|
| There is one now.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Awesome! He deserved it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| One very iconic brand and set of products for sure. magicwand to
| you.
| throw0101b wrote:
| From Computer History Museum, "Adobe Systems - The Founders'
| Perspective" (2002):
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl0GthyD3f0
|
| Also "PostScript: A Digital Printing Press":
|
| * https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printi...
| anderspitman wrote:
| Dr Warnock spoke several months ago at an awesome graphics
| symposium at the University of Utah:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4lCCyKkChk&pp=ygUkdXRhaCBncmFwa...
| dahart wrote:
| 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
| refset wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26849131
| hanniabu wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| If there isn't a list of past In Memoriam posts then that would
| be good to add too.
| gregw2 wrote:
| Good Warnock interview with tech details and history I haven't
| seen elsewhere:
|
| https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-warnock/
|
| A good interview detailing among other things why he succesfully
| made type1 fonts a trade secret for a while:
|
| https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/adobe-co-founder...
|
| Cringley book chapter on the three way competition of Adobe,
| Microsoft and Apple:
| https://www.cringely.com/2013/03/14/accidental-empires-chapt...
|
| Found these while looking for John Warnock's blog/website which
| was really interesting to read in the late 90s but I can't
| remember its name...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's
| vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard":
|
| Alan Kay on "Should web browsers have stuck to being document
| viewers?" and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard:
|
| https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browse...
|
| >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:)
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/linguistic-motherbo...
|
| >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!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456710
|
| Brian Reid's deep detailed historic dive "PostScript and
| Interpress: a comparison":
|
| https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html
| NorSoulx wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/12/postscript...
|
| Warnock's innovations have been instrumental in shaping digital
| publishing and design.
| mikerg87 wrote:
| Along with Ivan Sutherland he did a lot of foundational work in
| computer graphics. His PhD was 32 pages, describing this
| algorithm.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm
| smugma wrote:
| Direct link to PhD thesis:
|
| http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/warnock-subdivision-for-def...
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Both at U of U, with all the other founders of computer
| graphics: Jim Clark, Jim Blinn, Ed Catmull, ...
| fortran77 wrote:
| See also this 1991 video "Adobe PostScript, the Language of
| Business" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayb-KF32uWk
| rurban wrote:
| Not this Warnock though:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma
| glimshe wrote:
| 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.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > most important real-world applications for personal
| computers.
|
| Applications are one thing (e.g. the way they took away Quark's
| iron-handed grasp on DTP).
|
| But, then there are the standards.
|
| For example, PDF.
|
| The modern world would barely operate without PDF.
| codethief wrote:
| > The modern world would barely operate without PDF.
|
| Maybe. But maybe people would have simply adopted other
| standards, like djvu.
| j1elo wrote:
| It wouldn't be the same. It would be much more confusing.
|
| - _Thank you for the meeting, oh and please send me the
| djvu of your reports_
|
| - _Oh I 'd swear we already had this conversation and I had
| already sent them?_
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'm guessing we'd shorten the name to just vu. djvu is a
| mouthful.
| postmodest wrote:
| We'd all be using TeX, right?
| ruuda wrote:
| How would we exchange, print, and view rendered documents?
| DVI perhaps, but it's not completely self-contained.
| fidotron wrote:
| This grasp of history isn't quite right.
|
| 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.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>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
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| 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.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >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.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>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.
| layer8 wrote:
| HTML might have become a document interchange format, and
| we'd be less stuck to fixed page-based layouts as with PDF
| now.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Apples and oranges, my friend.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's exactly my point though. We might be using oranges
| instead of apples now if history had been different.
| weebull wrote:
| We use both for different things. They don't solve the
| same problem.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| hasmanean wrote:
| In a different universe we would have been happy with the
| limitations of html and published everything with a
| minimal of markup.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Adobe's rent-seeking practices
|
| 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).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Don't forget Flash.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Wasn't that Macromedia, and acquired by Adobe?
| binarymax wrote:
| Flash was developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe
| well into its maturity.
| random3 wrote:
| Photoshop was acquired too
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Adobe
| not sure if this is relevant though.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Prior to it becoming seriously popular though, I think?
| rmason wrote:
| At the time it was purchased the company was primarily
| two brothers from Ann Arbor. Might have had one or two
| employees.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| Thank you for that. I liked and admired Warnock, and hate
| Adobe. But your framing put it in a proper context.
|
| But from the day it was announced I have always thought
| postscript is completely backwards.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Not to be too forward, but PostScript is supposed to be
| completely backwards.
|
| It's not bad, it's just drawn that way.
|
| The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug
| Eradication Routines -- October 1989:
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-
| octo...
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Structuring_Conven
| tio...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript
|
| 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:
|
| https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html
|
| >From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier>
|
| >Posted: Fri Mar 1 19:08:05 1985
|
| >Subject: PostScript and Interpress: a comparison
|
| [...]
|
| >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.
|
| [...]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's Brian Reed of DEC and Scribe fame?
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scien
| tist...>
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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!
|
| https://freecomputerbooks.com/PostScript-Language-
| Program-De...
|
| https://freecomputerbooks.com/Thinking-in-Postscript.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115946
|
| >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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19751161
|
| >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!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19882301
|
| >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).
|
| https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scient
| ist...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| PDF is an inkblot on the web.
| paradox460 wrote:
| 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
| jeffrogers wrote:
| Looking at Adobe's website, you'd never know it...
| ex_mozillian wrote:
| recheck that...
| jll29 wrote:
| R.I.P.
|
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| coldcode wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Whoa. I saw him at an event a couple months ago and he seemed
| pretty fit. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about PARC and
| Adobe.
| rexreed wrote:
| Is that event recorded and available for online viewing?
| chris_wot wrote:
| He invented the "Warnock Algorithm"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm
|
| Edit: had a brain fart, fixed my idiocy
| gdubs wrote:
| Dang: Black bar please.
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock
| whatever1 wrote:
| Funny thing, I learned about the guy from something completely
| irrelevant to adobe. His book on weight loss.
|
| Made me understand that at the grand scheme of things it's a
| calorie balance problem that one has to solve, regardless of what
| you eat.
|
| His method included junk food and prepackaged food because it is
| portioned and you know exactly the calorific content.
|
| Worked for me.
|
| Goodbye:(
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Are you sure you're not confusing John Warnock with John
| Walker, author of the Hacker's Diet?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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."
| jhh wrote:
| Just to clarify, not trying to correct anyone here, the third
| attendee was Bob Sproull, author of "Principles of Interactive
| Computer Graphics"?
| [deleted]
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yes.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And not to be confused with UC Berkeley's Robert Sproull,
| though I suspect he'd already died prior to this story's
| timeline:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gordon_Sproul>
| auggierose wrote:
| Never heard of this book, just got it for PS0.55 (ok, PS3.35
| including postage).
|
| In my unsuccessful search to get it even cheaper, I came
| across this book, seems to be by the same Bob Sproull:
| https://www.routledge.com/The-Problem-Solving-Problem-
| Preven...
|
| From graphics to management.
| [deleted]
| da02 wrote:
| 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 ;)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| DougMerritt wrote:
| You're overly humble Chuck. ;)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-20 23:00 UTC)