The history of PostScript

These pages provide an overview of the evolution of the PostScript page description language. PostScript is now on the market for more than 25 years. It has had a profound impact on the publishing industry and even today remains an important industry standard.

For more information on the history of prepress in general, please jump to this page. Part of this overview is based on “Accidental empires”, the book written by Robert Cringely on the personal computer revolution.

The dark ages

To appreciate PostScript, you have to know how the market worked before it became available. In the earlie 80’s, if you needed typesetting equipment, you went to Acme Typesetters, and they would sell you an Acme system with an Acme output device. Then you would follow at least two weeks of training to learn how to use the system. The Acme system would be incompatible with equipment from any other manufacturer. In most cases, it would even be difficult or impossible to exchange data with other systems.

If you owned a personal computer, you could hook it up to a dot-matrix printer that would output low quality bitmap characters. Graphics could be done but the quality was only acceptable to the nerds that bought computers in those days.

The beginning: Xerox

The history of PostScript starts at Parc, the research institute of Xerox. This is where many of the computer technologies we now take for granted were developed. The laser printer, the graphical user interface and ethernet are some prime examples.

One of the brilliant engineers working at Xerox was John Warnock. He developed a language called “Interpress” that could be used to control Xerox laser printers. He and his boss, Charles M. ‘Chuck’ Geschke, tried for two years to convince Xerox to turn Interpress into a commercial product. When this failed, they decided to leave Xerox and try it on their own.

Chuck Geschke

John Warnock

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