Chris Dwyer wrote: > PS: I have always wondered why Postscript has never been used as an > interface for both screen and paper. I know Apple tested it years > ago, but could not agree on Adobe's licensing demands, so Apple > developed their own GUIs. It was... c.1990 I believe First SUN computers had a Postcript windowing system, then NeXT had serious idea to use Display Postscript for its entire windowing system. Postscript is actually a special evolution of FORTH and could be very fast when/if optimized. But in 1990 the only hardware which had the oomf was very expensive such as Silicon Graphics computers. NeXT was Steve Jobs grand project after he left Apple [was ousted] ... It was full of great ideas and had some great software, a natural successor to Amiga in many respects. I attended a bunch of NeXT users groups meeting in New York. The thing that burning us all up [Amiga lovers] was the hotly rumored graphics card which was going to let the NeXT graphics really fly - alpha transparency thought the windowing system, easy programmer calls to it etc. finally at one meeting some guy showed up with it in his briefcase, breathless having just arrived in New York for the meeting to demo th card and show off fancy application for it. It WAS gorgeous. Then he left and the next few meetings there was no card... we began to suspect there was one NeXT guy flying around th country with the one NeXT graphics card showing up at shows, users groups etc.
Anyway it never quite materialized, although some beautiful graphics apps did taking full advantage of the postscript system. NeXT OS was based on Mach and Unix from Carnegie Mellon. Then It became NeXTStep and would even run on regular Intel PC -- terrific it was. Finally Apple got themselves in a really bad know and Steve Jobs was rehired. He sold them NeXTStep and it was retooled and renamed MacOSX haha tada! I think along the way the Display Postscript was dropped, in part because there was not enough momentum behind it. Silicon Graphics developed GL [Graphics Language] then OpenGL which became something of a norm and when cheaper Video cards started coming available for PCs c.1993 OpenGL swept into acceptance. Display Psotcript could not really compete because it had a complex layering and nesting ideas, but did not have any implicit concept of 3D. OpenGL on the other hand was *all* about #D and lighting and renderers and shaders etc -- hotly driven by the game market. Ironically perhaps 3D interfaces have still not really happened even thought graphics systems now are cheap and awesome and ubiquitous. In the background of course postscript RIPs [Raster Image Processors] have become very powerful and a mainstay of publishing and print technologies.The NeXT seemed at the time to have pushed all the right buttons, but it took 10 years really for it to happen.. so it goes -- To unsubscribe from the list, just send an email to lists at rebol.com with unsubscribe as the subject.
