Adobe co-founder and PostScript co-creator Charles Geschke dies, aged 81 Charles Geschke, co-founder of Adobe and co-creator of PostScript - and a reason this story is visually appealing - died Friday, April 16, at the age of 81. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan sent an announcement of Geschke’s passing to staff that included this tribute from his collaborator of five decades, John Warnock: In 1982, …
Never found "colophon" useful? How do you talk about them then? I mean, it may not come up as often as indicia, but surely at least once or twice a week.
Why, I don't know how many times I've invited a young lady up to see some colophons.
Sometimes owners of books will add their own colophons. No doubt you remember one such forms a plot point early in Ransome's Missee Lee.
I'd expect a stack trace to allow debugging of the unexpected event.
Might need a slightly larger stone to carve it all into though.
Unfortunate to see the passing of another founder of a critical cornerstone in the technologies we all take for granted now.
I'm thinking we need a Sir Terry clacks-overhead message within the postscript code
I always wonder how many execs can be so short-sighted. Well, better for him to be motivated to leave to build his own successful company - otherwise he may have gone nowhere in Xerox.
As someone who always liked typography, I raise my hat to one of those who brought it to the computer world and freed us from ugly computer-generated documents.
Apple actually got the WIMP ideas from XEROX PARC. The people at PARC said Jobs and Apple were the first to grasp key ideas behind WIMP. Ideas implemented in the Lisa and Mac in the early to mid 80's. Others followed Apple thus indirectly XEROX PARC.
One of the great 'what ifs' is if XEROX manglement grasped what PARC was doing and actually tried to seriously commercialize their ideas in the early to mid 80's. They had the resources to do it.
To be fair to Xerox: they were bankrolling PARC at the time. Just imagine how little would have happened if it hadn't been for the largesse of companies bankrolling PARC, Bell Labs.
Start up culture is supposed to mimic this but the focus on scale and tax efficient exit strategies seems designed to throttle the kind of "happy accident" that innovation needs.
Ah... those were the days indeed. I count myself so fortunate to have been brought into a technical college that taught printing and packaging because they needed someone to look after all the new fangled DTP kit.
As many technical demonstrators were due to retire, I sat in on the teaching sessions and learnt how to do all these what are now archaic looking tasks. Chromalin, plate making of many various types, hot metal (Ludlow), photogravure, flexo, offset litho, rotogravure, hot foil impression, book binding, marbling for end leafs and sides, typesetting with forms, inset stitch trim (IST), saddle stitching... loved it all. So hands on.
Sadly though the college couldn’t turn those skills into saleable training for the print industry anymore so it broke up and these craft skills passed into the remit of retiree leisure courses at a local heritage centre. Not enough in it to pay the bills of a young man with kids.
A stone, a spliff, wind, a motion...
Oh, sorry, he's died!
When the hell did we become so prissy and phobic about dying and death that we choose to use a nonsensical word with multiple associations to describe a fundamental and normal part of human experience?
Adobe co-founder and PostScript co-creator Charles Geschke dies, aged 81
There we go, what's wrong with that?
It’s an abhorrent Americanism.
It’s a centuries-old meaning of “pass” that you seem to be unaware of — see definition 2. b. of pass, v. in the OED :
b. Of spiritual destination; esp. in to pass to God, heaven, etc.a 1225 Ancr. R. 330 þet we moten þuruh rudi scheome passen to þe heouene. […] 1859 Tennyson Guinevere 690 She . . past To where beyond these voices there is peace.
“Die” is certainly more straightforward and less figurative than “pass”, but in my view, the latter’s alleged prissiness is in the eye of the beholder. Just as some people refer to life as being a journey rather than a destination, other people might extend the analogy to death being a continuation of a soul’s journey towards a spiritual destination.
Regarding its phobicity, fear of dying and death has been around for a long, long time — more prevalent in some cultures and individuals, less prevalent in others. Whether a preference for “pass” over “die” is a sign of such fear reaching the level of an anxiety disorder is a question that might be better addressed by clinical psychologists.
All that is true, but 'pass' as a euphemism for 'died' has only sprung into common parlance in the last twenty years or so. Folk used to often say 'passed away' which still skates around the truth, but is at least passably specific as we don't use that phrase in any other context. But 'pass' and 'passed' are just hopelessly and sadly signs of human unwillingness to deal with reality in a meaningful way. Are we really so fragile and unable to cope with the 'human condition' that we have to hide the reality of our lives behind words that are functionally meaningless because they are so ambiguous?
In your opening comment and in your comment directly above, you yourself have shown that “pass” as a euphemism for “die” is neither functionally meaningless nor ambiguous. (Given the OED examples, I’d describe it as “resprung” rather than “sprung”.) Regarding “pass” as a human unwillingness to face death, it depends — different people grieve in different ways and at different speeds, and if one accepts the Kübler-Ross model, some persist in denial longer than others. On “our” fragility and inability to cope with “the human condition” (was that a euphemism for “mortality”?), it depends upon how you define “we”; there is likely to be some sliver of humanity who does exhibit that fragility and inability to cope.
Interpress. Shortly after Adobe was founded, someone I worked with at DEC, who had been at Xerox PARC, told me about that new startup. Interpress had some limitations, and Adobe PostScript had filled them in, making it a more proper page description language. But I've since heard that Interpress was enhanced (v2?) so in its final form it could do more than PostScript or its derivative PDF. I haven't seen it, but supposedly it exists.
Adobe is a pain in the butt. Crap with open platforms and they prefer to kill off and take their software to the grave with them (Flash, Acroread Linux, Distributed Photoshop).
Sure, it is their intellectual property to do as they want with it...
... but piss off and die already so a more useful / open company can take your place in the market.
(I mean no disrespect to Charles Geschke, I am a big PostScript fan. His talents were wasted on Adobe).
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