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Comment by kilovoltaire | Hacker News Reader

I remember being delighted when I learned that .ps "images" were actually programs.

At some point I wanted to make a book of PostScript code on left pages / graphical output on right pages, but I only made four pages:

https://github.com/hrldcpr/geno-pheno#geno--pheno

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What's really cool is you could build window systems based on shipping around PS fragments instead of bitmaps. SUN's NeWS had a ton of technical advantages for networked workstations such as display and scale independence and smaller wire size. It was also interesting because PS could do a bunch of calculation on the display device, like draw the graph of a math function, and that spec could be encapsulated in other code. It could also do I/O which was interesting in a UI capacity, ie OpenWindows.

Right around this same time, X11 was coming up on other platforms like HP and Apollo, and it seems to have "won", and NeWS disappeared.

I wonder if the time is right for a resurgence in this idea, now that we're rethinking compositors, X servers, Wayland etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

That sounds a lot like Display Postscript[1] from the Next days, which lives on in OSX/macOS as a superset of PDF.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

Here's a program for the back cover:

https://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/self_post.txt

trivia: I recall someone submitting an ICFP contest in postscript, where the document would display the solution too :)

ps: nice idea btw

This is very cool, please make it happen.

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