Printing has come a long way since the early days of computing and, 40 years ago, Adobe’s PostScript played a important pioneering role, as an early page description language as an alternative to each printer having its own language.
As printing was such a fundamental part of the burgeoning personal computing revolution of the 1980s, the fact any PostScript file could be printed on any printer that supported the standard was a powerful selling point and one that has echoes in the independent file formats of today that can be processed by different programs.
It also offered easy access to the print driver specifications, another concept taken for granted today.
And, like many technologies, its development mirrored that of the hardware it was driving, starting with laser printers and eventually evolving into the screen-based page descriptions of today.
Pdfs are now ubiquitous but few realise their heritage goes back before Adobe acquired PostScript and made it the standard for printers across the world.
