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My high school had a computer lab with a networked LaserWriter (this might have been 1987). It outclassed any screen in the room, so far as display resolution. And with its 68000 processor and PostScript interpreter, it was the fastest and most capable graphics machine I'd ever seen. Indeed, a 300dpi laser printer driven by PostScript was a wonder.

I ordered the Addison Wesley documentation. I figured out that sending a text file to the printer which started with "%!PS" would make the rest be processed as PostScript. Suddenly I could code vector graphics programs and send them to the LaserWriter and get beautiful prints. I was reading Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and my memory is that there were some great ideas for graphics in that.

The good news: I got a chance to program in a well thought-out interpreted language (a wonder, coming from the world of BASIC, Fortran, C or even Pascal). I got to produce wonderful and intricate graphics output. Reading the IEEE article makes me grateful that the Adobe designers "put functionality over speed".

The bad news: The most interesting output could still take minutes (or more) to run. Of course, this was confusing (or annoying) if someone else in the lab wanted, say, to print their term paper then run off to class. I'd like to think that I learned to run my print jobs at odd hours, and in the worst case, to power cycle the printer and lose my print, to make the device available to the room.