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by jwstarr 621 days ago
As a a starting point, "The Origins of PostScript" (https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/2018-warnock.pdf) provides a few details on the language and Gaffney's involvement. Warnock's oral history for the Computer History Museum (https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273875...) also includes the story. Gaffney's patent provides the most detail but, unfortunately, it is written as a patent rather than a language description.

The DoD DTIC service has a couple of reports that cover the Harbor Pilot Simulation, but I haven't found any reports written by E&S. The Computer History Museum has some records from Evans and Sutherland, but I don't think any of them cover the language.

3 comments

Thanks, but I saw that much, I should have been clearer. I'm hoping for something on the scale of a survey if not a paper.

Honestly, my first curiosity regards whether Chuck Moore and Forth get any mention or whether this is a true parallel development, possibly necessitated by the hardware at hand. My perception, based on zero evidence, was that Forth had some influence on the design of Postscript.

Apparently not. From "The Origins of PostScript" mentioned by GP:

> The architecture suggested by John Gaffney was to be based on a fictitious stack machine (at that time we had no knowledge of a similar approach taken by the Forth language).

That is the only mention of "Forth".

That led me to this presentation on the Eidophor projector https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-BvMcqEc98
Is that oral history actually available for download?
Yes, there is a link to a PDF containing a transcript in the page linked by the post above.