Funny you bring that up, I was just reading about this:

When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he pitched Adobe on the idea of using PS as the display system for his new workstation computers. The result was Display PostScript, or DPS. DPS added basic functionality to improve performance by changing many string lookups into 32 bit integers, adding support for direct output with every command, and adding functions to allow the GUI to inspect the diagram. Additionally, a set of "bindings" was provided to allow PS code to be called directly from the C programming language. NeXT used these bindings in their NeXTStep system to provide an object oriented graphics system. Although DPS was written in conjunction with NeXT, Adobe sold it commercially and it was a common feature of most Unix workstations in the 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#History

There is something interesting (if you can say "interesting" to the idea of writing, say, an e-mail client in PostScript):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

I remember some fuss being made about this in the early days of OS X, about "looking glass" (the gui system) using display postscript. Anybody know anything about that? If it's still a part of OS X or if it fell by the way side?

OSX was alleged (by Apple, even) to use PDF as the display language, but Quartz just has an object model that maps very nicely to PDF, making PDF transformations and export very easy.

This reminds me of Terry Davis' TempleOS, which features an ubiquitous hyperdocument system.

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...

Terry himself is schizophrenic but it's a fascinating piece of outsider art in many respects. He's even posted on HN under several accounts, but he's aggressive and disruptive and inevitably ends up banned.

I get why you'd have that impression (due to his mental illness), but TermpleOS is certainly not outsider art. While unconventional in some ways (and not sharing the aims of commercial projects), it's no more a piece of outsider art than e.g. KnightOS. Its code isn't bad, the design is certainly not idiosyncratic. It has none of the "classic" traits of outsider art that other hobby projects don't. You can read its code much like that of any other kernel. And IIRC, Terry Davis has the kind of academic credentials you'd expect from someone writing an operating system, too.

I am a professional operating system developer. In 1990, I was hired to work on Ticketmaster's VAX operating system.

Hi Terry! Sorry, didn't know you had a new account.

I read some of your post history - can you explain how what you were doing with Ticketmaster was systems programming? It sounds like what would now be considered application programming, but I have no idea how intensive your work was at the time. High-performance code can often cross the line.

TempleOS is simply fascinating. I'm sure you know that I can't agree on the 'divine' part but it's certainly a fascinating OS. Writing an OS is a tough task by any means, let alone a reasonably fast one with a novel presentation. That's a lot of work, even for a productive OS programmer.

Have you taken a look at MenuetOS, Plan9, Oberon, or other non-traditional OSs? I'm curious what you have to think of their own unique features.

I applaud your goal of taking it back to basics. I think you're largely right about the number of abstractions between you and the hardware. Really really fast code needs to be written close to the metal.

I worked on the code that installed language modules into kernel space. I wrote a check-disk utility. I did a file compression archive. There were serial port drivers and I made a command to reset a stuck port.

I worked in VAX assembly language.

I did firmware for a bar code reader networking device with keypad and display. I worked on image processing for an actual bar code reader itself.

I worked there 1990-1996. About half was user space. The other half was kernel or firmware on bare metal.

-----

Pat and I started at the same time. He was in school with me, in fact in my differential equations class. He dropped out of school. I stayed in and got my master's in electrical engineering while working part time at Ticketmaster. I graduated with master's in 1994 and stayed with Ticketmaster for a year.

I returned to Ticketmaster for 3 weeks in 2002. Pat was a boss.

NeWS was an interesting experiment in this direction.

It seems quite odd that old VT terminal hardware is still in use, while it would be almost impossible to resurrect something like NeWS. A case of complexity I guess, but also the worrying volatility of storage media.

I suspect VT-standards-related hardware (and software emulators) survives because the protocol can be implemented without fear of getting dragged into court for licensing fees. Whereas if you wanted to implement NeWS (or Display Postscript) even today, you still have to license it. There is an informal mention that NeWS had too many third-party components to ever open source. [1]

[1] https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM

What about markdown files and relative links? Works on Github and MacDown.

https://github.com/blog/1395-relative-links-in-markup-files

See Chapter Nine:

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo11.pdf

I've played video games that were distributed as PDFs. You can actually do a lot inside a PDF.

Could you not do a similar thing with html and css sans js?