I think a lot of the talk about the rough side of Glasgow has been overblown. Every city has rough areas and dodgy people. There are parts of London it's inadvisable to go out in after dark, in fact I've lived in some.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html
One of the strengths/weaknesses of HyperNeWS was that it relied on PostScript scripting - which was perhaps a bit tricky for us mere mortals. So Arthur wrote an ANSI C to PostScript compiler (in PostScript) - one of his Glaswegian colleages named this PDB, which stood, of course, for Pure Dead Brilliant.
The Wee Man says... Here You (that'll be right): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scNLfr1EP08
Actually, I seem to remember that I owe you some thanks, I blagged a very early copy of Java from you in early '95 - which led to some fairly interesting stuff (at least for Scotland).