[FRIAM] Perhaps of Interest to the (other) old timers here!

[Owen Densmore]

On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 10:48 AM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
wrote:

> Thanks, Steve! I enjoy these slices of history and peeking into the
> discussions of the time on fundamental issues.
>
> Owen, were you involved with the Interscript project mentioned near the
> end of the story? Interscript being the scripting of dynamic Interpress
> documents which later spun out to Postscript.
>
> https://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interscript/IntroductionToInterscript.pdf
>
> As mentioned in story, the vision they had still hasn't been delivered.
> Maybe JavaScript for the DOM or perhaps agentscript.org? :-)
>
>  “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
>

Actually, IIRC, JAM, a dev command language, was the precursor of PS.  I
think that's the right name. It could also manage the key pad, a small
device with I think 5 keys. And they were often chorded (multiple fingers
as well as just one). JAM could use this as well as the keyboard. Seriously
hip devs (Chuck and John among them). Why? They could have more memory for
code!

But the true birth of PS was the paper Chuck and John for siggraph
outlining an abstraction so to speak of PS, possibly a JAM api. The day
after the conference they left Xerox because now the PS architecture was
published, thus unprotected .. er open sourced!

    -- Owen
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