PostScript

Jeff, what do you have for us? I got PSUtils, kind of an oldie but a goodie.

So it's an old package of PostScript tools, but the modern version also works on PDFs.

So it was rewritten in Python by Ruben Thomas a couple of years ago, and you probably already have it on your machine, And it's a suite of tools, so each command in the package does one job to the pages of a document.

Kind of very Unix-like, right? You just, you do one thing, you do it well.

And there's a whole plug-in architecture for adding more functions without having to, you know, do a big update.

Stack-based like PostScript and Forth?

yeah i suppose i mean you just you know you're pushing our it's like any language really you're pushing arguments onto a stack and when the function you call a function it pops the arguments off the stack and does things with them that's awesome

name a

It's a vector file format.

Encapsulated PostScript.

It's a legacy vector-based graphics format created in the 1980s designed for high-resolution commercial printing, so that makes sense.

It's the pre-SVG-

Uh, anyway, I'm gonna spend my afternoon just digging through the Domino's website, see if I can't hack into the mainframe, get John Domino's number.

Maybe he'll come on the show and talk to us.

Oh, wait, Encapsulated PostScript.

Yeah, John Domino, come on the show.

Jake doesn't get it.

Almost every desirable component of the PC he used to write that article – the mouse, 3.5-inch disks, CD-ROM, icons, menus, fonts, PostScript printer, balloon help, control panels, trash can or recycle bin – was introduced by Apple.

Without clever technologies continuing to debut on the Mac, Jake would have no more clever technologies on his computer.

In the Apple-less world he apathetically imagines, we could look forward to decades of bleak, uninspired, multi-megabyte Microsoft glop for the rest of our computing lives.