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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: PostScript and Interpress
Message-ID: <788@uw-beaver>
Date: Thu, 7-Feb-85 03:10:11 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.788
Posted: Thu Feb  7 03:10:11 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 8-Feb-85 01:25:56 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Brian Reid 

I worked as a consultant for Xerox for about 2 years on the Interpress
project. During that time I signed several carefully-worded nondisclosure
agreements. At the end of the two years I just couldn't take the 
sluggishness and small-mindedness of the Xerox product organization
any longer, and quit that consulting relationship.

Xerox was never willing to let me have copies of the Interpress documents,
even the ones I wrote, and they have a long history of throwing various
corporate tantrums involving secrecy and computers, and more recently
involving people who once worked for Xerox but do not any more. 

Two weeks ago I told a correspondent from Xerox that I would refrain from
commenting publicly on Interpress and PostScript until I got written
clarification from them that the nondisclosure agreements I signed are
no longer in force. Naturally this letter, like the oft-promised copies
of the manuals I wrote, never came.

In view of the rambling marketing-ese that Jerry Mendelson has sent to
the net recently that very much confuses the issue of Interpress and
PostScript, I would like to announce that I will in the next week or
so write a careful comparison of Interpress (in all of its various 
unimplemented and developmental subsets and versions, as best I 
can reconstruct them from memory) and PostScript (one version, completely
implemented). Because these Xerox guys play hardball, I don't want
to make this comparison a one-night hip shot, but I want to make sure
that the worthy people who read the laser-lovers distribution do not
believe without questioning everything that a marketing person from
any company, even Xerox, tells them.

Maybe in the intervening time I will send out a short explanation of
what a cache is, and how it works, and how a performance measurement
should be made of a system that employs a cache. The font cache on
the Apple LaserWriter (a PostScript printer) is bigger than the 
entire main memory of the Xerox Dandelion computer driving the 
Xerox 8044 printer costing 4 times as much.

Let me close by tossing in the remark that PostScript is to Interpress as
C is to Ada.