Kind of random, but you made me think of it. I always wanted to do an entire site in PDF, with all the links opening other pdfs on the same server. That or postscript...
When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he pitched Adobe on the idea of using PS as the display system for his new workstation computers. The result was Display PostScript, or DPS. DPS added basic functionality to improve performance by changing many string lookups into 32 bit integers, adding support for direct output with every command, and adding functions to allow the GUI to inspect the diagram. Additionally, a set of "bindings" was provided to allow PS code to be called directly from the C programming language. NeXT used these bindings in their NeXTStep system to provide an object oriented graphics system. Although DPS was written in conjunction with NeXT, Adobe sold it commercially and it was a common feature of most Unix workstations in the 1990s.
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
Terry himself is schizophrenic but it's a fascinating piece of outsider art in many respects. He's even posted on HN under several accounts, but he's aggressive and disruptive and inevitably ends up banned.
I read some of your post history - can you explain how what you were doing with Ticketmaster was systems programming? It sounds like what would now be considered application programming, but I have no idea how intensive your work was at the time. High-performance code can often cross the line.
TempleOS is simply fascinating. I'm sure you know that I can't agree on the 'divine' part but it's certainly a fascinating OS. Writing an OS is a tough task by any means, let alone a reasonably fast one with a novel presentation. That's a lot of work, even for a productive OS programmer.
Have you taken a look at MenuetOS, Plan9, Oberon, or other non-traditional OSs? I'm curious what you have to think of their own unique features.
I applaud your goal of taking it back to basics. I think you're largely right about the number of abstractions between you and the hardware. Really really fast code needs to be written close to the metal.
I worked in VAX assembly language.
I did firmware for a bar code reader networking device with keypad and display. I worked on image processing for an actual bar code reader itself.
I worked there 1990-1996. About half was user space. The other half was kernel or firmware on bare metal.
-----
Pat and I started at the same time. He was in school with me, in fact in my differential equations class. He dropped out of school. I stayed in and got my master's in electrical engineering while working part time at Ticketmaster. I graduated with master's in 1994 and stayed with Ticketmaster for a year.
I returned to Ticketmaster for 3 weeks in 2002. Pat was a boss.
It seems quite odd that old VT terminal hardware is still in use, while it would be almost impossible to resurrect something like NeWS. A case of complexity I guess, but also the worrying volatility of storage media.