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Comment by gregw2 | Hacker News Reader

Good Warnock interview with tech details and history I haven't seen elsewhere:

https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-warnock/

A good interview detailing among other things why he succesfully made type1 fonts a trade secret for a while:

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/adobe-co-founder...

Cringley book chapter on the three way competition of Adobe, Microsoft and Apple: https://www.cringely.com/2013/03/14/accidental-empires-chapt...

Found these while looking for John Warnock's blog/website which was really interesting to read in the late 90s but I can't remember its name...

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More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard":

Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browse...

>Owen Densmore recounted John Warnock’s idea that PostScript was actually a “linguistic motherboard”. (This was part of a discussion with Owen about NeFS, which was a proposal for the next version of NFS to run a PostScript interpreter in the kernel. More about that here:)

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/linguistic-motherbo...

>Window System? ..NeWS ain’ no stinkin’ Window System! -or- Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility, by Owen Densmore, Sun Microsystems, NeWS Team

>Introduction

>NeWS is difficult to understand simply because it is not just a window system. It is a “Swiss Army Knife” containing several components, some of which contribute to its use as a window system, others which provide the networking facilities for implementing the client-server model, all embedded in a programmable substrate allowing extremely flexible and creative combination of these elements.

>During the initial implementation phase of the Macintosh LaserWriter software, I temporarily transfered from Apple to Adobe working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers. At lunch one day, I asked: “John, what do you plan to do after LaserWriter?” His answer was interesting:

>PostScript is a linguistic “mother board”, which has “slots” for several “cards”. The first card we (Adobe) built was a graphics card. We’re considering other cards. In particular, we’ve thought about other network services, such as a file server card.

>He went on to say how a programmable network was really his goal, and that the printing work was just the first component. His mentioning using PostScript for a file server is particularly interesting: Sun’s next version of NFS is going to use PostScript with file extentions as the client-server protocol!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456710

Brian Reid’s deep detailed historic dive “PostScript and Interpress: a comparison”:

https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html

Thanks for that. I found this exchange quite a stark difference from the "wisdom" of the Paypal Mafia:

WARNOCK: Oh, I’ve always liked mathematics; problem solving has always been fun. My saving grace in life is that I was not introduced to computers at an early age.

INTERVIEWER: Why wouldn’t it help to learn about computers earlier?

WARNOCK: I went through the university, all the way to the master’s level, so I got a good, solid liberal education. I believe it’s really important to have a very solid foundation in mathematics, English, and the basic sciences. Then, when you become a graduate student, it’s okay to learn as much as you can about computers.

Good lord, I forgot about Cringely. I still remember the spot illustration of a frog in a business suit on his site that I later found out he got from a Dover Illustrations clip art book (probably cam originally from Punch or another old English mag)

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