[OS X TeX] Totally OT: PostScript maze

[William Adams]

On Mar 19, 2007, at 5:39 PM, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> The NeXT used to come with Display PostScript as the display and  
> print language. Being a full PS interpreter it meant you could  
> write programs that ran in the display environment. One of the  
> nicest was a sort of translucent fish that swam accross your screen.

Hmm, missed that one.

I used to use it to extend Altsys Virtuoso's strokes and fills ---  
had one which was an improvement of one written by Olav Martin Kvern  
which would print the length of a line --- by contrast now one has to  
either get a drawing tool w/ direct support for such (Canvas) or get  
a plug-in (CADtools for InDesign).

> Of course, the act that they had the full PS there and full PS  
> includes file operations and since the window server was running as  
> root, there was a slight security hole ;-) initially, that is.

As an example of that, Frank Siegert had a .ps program which would  
reprogram a NeXT system to play a sound whenever a certain sequence  
was typed ``batman'' I think it was.

William
(who has a copy at home of David Ahl's book on computer games which  
was mentioned in the web page in the first post....)

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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