6/10/2026 at 10:47:46 PM
by frizlab
6/14/2026 at 3:41:38 PM
To put the mad profit that Xerox got from laser printers into context: Alan Kay estimated it alone paid off everything that Xerox had invested in PARC, and then a lot, lot more. (I think PARC in the 70s cost less than $10 mil annually.)by nxobject
6/14/2026 at 1:50:09 PM
I would guess that this was close to (if not the same as) the laser printer that Richard Stallman was so frustrated by that he created the concept of free software¹, just to never have to deal with unfixable bugs again?It seems to me that moving the processing from the computer to the printer had a reasonable rationale, but has been a huge detriment to us all ever since; printers are notoriously, almost legendarily, mysterious and opaque. The NeXT machines moved the logic back to the computer (since NeXTSTEP had PostScript as part of its operating system), and I think it’s time that we do that as well.
by teddyh
6/14/2026 at 2:08:04 PM
There existed "PostScript printers" that rendered PostScript themselves, and "raster printers" that had the host PC handle it for them. The latter being infamous as "winprinters", because they relied on Windows infrastructure for it, and often lacked the driver support outside Windows because of it.Nowadays, any device that wants to send a print job has more than enough juice to just render whatever the fuck it wants. Modern connectivity trivializes bitmap transfer. And modern printer standards support things like "this engine wants 1b B/W rasters at 1200 dpi". Dealing with PostScript is very much a choice nowadays.
by ACCount37
6/14/2026 at 2:23:30 PM
I think the free software world needs to shift its focus more to freeing all sorts of hardware that isn't computers. As you say there's a reasonable rationale for running some printing code on the printer. The problem isn't that the code runs on the printer, the problem is that the printer is a black box. If it ran Linux and we could get a root shell that'd be a very good starting point for integrating it better with the host system.by inigyou
6/14/2026 at 2:43:06 PM
Running Linux (or another free software OS) on all your peripherals would be one way to solve it. Another way would be to not have so much CPU power in the peripherals in the first place. I sometimes suspect that the CPU in all our peripherals are present only to take control away from the computer owner; i.e. us. I instead suggest that the computer should have a device driver; that’s it. No computing should take place in peripherals at all. It may sometimes be necessary, but most often not.by teddyh
6/14/2026 at 4:16:39 PM
But that is it's own problem too, do you remember winmodems? They did move it to the host computer and the free software world still complainedby inigyou
6/14/2026 at 10:47:40 AM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19874245DonHopkins on May 10, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?
Brian Reid wrote about page independence, comparing Interpress' and PostScript's different approaches. Adobe's later voluntary Document Structuring Conventions actually used PostScript comments to make declarations and delimit different parts of the file -- it wasn't actually a part of the PostScript language, while Interpress defined pages as independent so they couldn't possibly affect each other:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/fa.laser-lovers/H3us...
>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.
The Definitive History of PostScript
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/postsc...
>Primary Source: Brian Reid's 1985 "laser-lovers" Post
>This document preserves the definitive first-person account of PostScript's origins, written by Brian Reid on March 2, 1985 — just 11 months after Adobe shipped its first PostScript manual.
>Brian Reid was uniquely positioned to write this history:
>He was there. As a consultant to Xerox PARC during the Interpress design, he worked directly with the principals.
>His thesis advisor was Bob Sproull — one of the three architects of Interpress (with Butler Lampson and John Warnock).
>He saw JAM at Stanford in 1981 — the direct predecessor to both Interpress and PostScript.
>fa.laser-lovers was the Hacker News of 1985 — this wasn't a casual post but a definitive statement to the technical community.
by DonHopkins
6/14/2026 at 12:00:54 PM
The Adobe philosophy on not implementing page protection would pretty regularly cause some _spectacular_ problems/bugs --- in particular, I can recall one ill-formed .eps file which somehow disabled the new page mechanism and was supposed to re-enable it, and which when placed after a different .eps which had some code which interfered w/ said re-enabling, would cause the document to stop generating new pages, instead overlaying each successive page on top of the previous one.One of the longest days of my life was generating a press-ready PDF using a beta of a then-new program called "pdftex" which would validate for the "Thomson Techno Task Force"'s standard... tried _every_ possible combination of printer drivers, PDF applications, and settings to learn that Adobe Acrobat would _not_ work, but Adobe Acrobat Reader would, that the printer driver had to be Apple's LaserWriter 8.6 (not the Adobe driver or some other LW version), and that the .ps file had to be PS Level 2 (not 3), but that "Generate Level 3 Page Semantics" had to be checked on.... over a quarter of a century since and that memory is still seared in my otherwise uncertain organic memory.
Naturally, this is all interwoven w/ the early history of the Macintosh and LaserWriter --- a couple of relevant stories on folklore.org
- https://www.folklore.org/Origins_of_Spline-Based_and_Anti-Al...
- https://www.folklore.org/The_End_Of_An_Era.html
It's also notable that Display PostScript was largely developed by folks at NeXT such as Mike Paquette.
Anyone who is interested in PostScript should definitely get "The Green Book" by Glenn Reid (_PostScript Language Program Design_) as well as his wonderful _Thinking in PostScript_.
That said, my wife's aunt oversaw one of the largest Xerox Alto/Star networks in the U.S. Government, and when we would chat, her stories would all be about how well things worked and how easy it was to manage (aside from getting funding), while mine were all stories about fixing weird problems...
by WillAdams