2. Adobe PostScript

PostScript is a page-descriptive programming language, or PDL, able to describe text as well as graphics on one page and precisely communicate this information between computer and an output device, regardless of its resolution capability.

A PostScript-empowered document containing text and images is specified by vector graphics: mathematic algorithms consisting of straight lines and Bézier curves that are digitally converted, or rasterised, into dots ready for printing. Its origins, like so many computer-led technological advancements of the 1970s and 1980s, can be sourced to the Xerox PARC research and development company in Palo Alto, California.

It was there that John Warnock and Charles Geschke began their work on standardising page-description code, a pursuit they considered essential for the future of office communications, the market in which Xerox, having developed the first laser printer in 1981, was a chief player. Originating in the 1970s, the first PARC page-description language was named 'Press', which, by the end of the decade, under the development of Warnock and Geschke, had evolved into the more sophisticated 'Interpress'.

Though this language was considered at the time by the Silicon Valley research community as a communications breakthrough, it seems that Xerox was not comfortable investing resources in a tool whose future application and success could not confidently be assured. Having completed their project only to see it shelved by its sponsor, Warnock and Geschke left PARC in 1982 to form their own company with the aim of further developing their code.

They named their start-up venture Adobe Systems, after Palo Alto's Adobe Creek, and began working on a second-generation page-description language, which they named PostScript.

Tom O’Reilly worked in the Academic Books Production department of Cambridge University Press, 2007–2014.

This blog comprises excerpts from his book What You See Is What You Get: Desktop Publishing And The Production Revolution at Cambridge University Press (1980–1996).