[simonh]

This is basically how a dedicated device driver for a particular printer works, but back then many operating systems like DOS didn’t have a standardised device driver architecture. Each application like Lotus 123 or Word Perfect would need its own driver for each printer.

To get around that you would write a driver that produced output that could be ingested by as many printers as possible. That intermediate output could be an image in theory, but a 300 dpi page image, especially for a whole document, was enormous at the time, far too big to fit in the memory of most computers or even fit on disc even with compression.

A language makes for a very compact, flexible and efficient intermediate format. Back in the 90s I set up a Linux box at work as a print sever, running the Ghostscript open source postscript interpreter, to print to various printers that didn’t natively support postscript. That was my first use of Linux.