PostScript

Chuck Geschke (b. 1939), John Warnock (b. 1940)

For more than a hundred years, printers were relatively simple devices: they
received a character in Baudot or ASCII over a wire, and then printed it.
Printing a page of text involved receiving (and printing) a few thousand
characters. The laser printer changed all that.
At 300 dots per inch, a standard printed page has roughly 8.5 million pixels.
But sending millions of 0s or 1s from a computer to the printer for every page
is both slow and inefficient, because most pages are composed mostly of white
space and text; it makes much more sense to send a font to the printer, and
then send characters.
PostScript® is a language that specifies how to send fonts and characters to
the printer—but it is also much more. It is a specialized computer language for
describing printed documents. Instead of receiving a sequence of characters or
a bitmap from the computer, the printer receives and runs a special-purpose
computer program that has the side effect of producing the desired page.
Because it is based on executing code, PostScript makes it possible to describe
complex pages and effects very succinctly.
PostScript itself was based on a language called Interpress that Chuck Geschke
and John Warnock developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
But Interpress was designed solely for the early Xerox printers—a very limited
market. So in 1982, Geschke and Warnock left Xerox PARC and founded Adobe
Systems®, where they created and then commercialized PostScript as a
universal page-description language for everything from low-cost home and
office printers to high-end phototypesetters.
The first printer to ship with PostScript was the Apple LaserWriter in March
1985. Together, the Macintosh and the LaserWriter let small businesses and
professionals easily and rapidly create high-quality typeset documents, giving
birth to desktop publishing. The PostScript language
became an industry standard and helped make Adobe one of the world’s most
important software publishers.
Eleven years later, Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF) as a
simplified, more modern version of PostScript. SEE ALSO Laser Printer (1971),
Xerox Alto (1973), Desktop Publishing (1985)
The PostScript language makes it easy to create complex illustrations with text,
graphics, and color.