QuoteNeXT's operating system graphics system was built entirely around Display Postscript, a technology NeXT licensed from Adobe. A former NeXT developer told me the terms were such that the source code for Display Postscript never left Adobe's campus — to work on the code, NeXT engineers had to go to Adobe and work in an isolated room with no outside network access. There are people at Apple who remember this arrangement vividly, and not fondly.
I hadn't heard this before (from
http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus)
Quote from: "pergamon"QuoteNeXT's operating system graphics system was built entirely around Display Postscript, a technology NeXT licensed from Adobe. A former NeXT developer told me the terms were such that the source code for Display Postscript never left Adobe's campus — to work on the code, NeXT engineers had to go to Adobe and work in an isolated room with no outside network access. There are people at Apple who remember this arrangement vividly, and not fondly.
I hadn't heard this before (from http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus)
I knew that Adobe is overprotective of PostScript, but I didn't know it was
that bad!
Eric
NeXT didn't license Display Postscript from Adobe.
NeXT wrote the DPS with Adobe where a partnership was forged and started the beginnings of porting Adobe's applications to NeXTSTEP.
Adobe holding onto the code is bullshit. That code for the initial project may have been kept at Adobe but it most certainly was at NeXT Corporate and updated solely by NeXT after it's initial release.
Quote from: "mdriftmeyer"
NeXT wrote the DPS with Adobe where a partnership was forged and started the beginnings of porting Adobe's applications to NeXTSTEP.
Adobe holding onto the code is bullshit. That code for the initial project may have been kept at Adobe but it most certainly was at NeXT Corporate and updated solely by NeXT after it's initial release.
I'm interested in some more of the history of this. In the 80's, it appeared that Adobe was a bit miffed at Sun for using PostScript as the basis for NeWS. Their response was DPS. This, at least, is the story as seen on the outside.
As for holding on to the code like the family jewels... what you say may have been true for NeXT. But I was on the DEC end of a DPS licensing deal and, man, they guarded those bits.
Does anyone know if the gtkDPS or gds (both of which used ghostscript) worked with NXHost? It'd be somewhat interesting to create a NeXT compatible display postscript server.
Well, this page at x.org (
https://www.x.org/archive/X11R6.7.0/doc/dps2.html) mentions that the GNUstep ecosystem can be compiled to render to DPS and this page (
https://www.x.org/archive/X11R6.7.0/doc/dps3.html) mentions Display GhostScript (DGS) was a GNUstep project. Alas, this GNU page (
https://www.gnu.org/software/dgs/) says none of that works anymore. It seems GNUstep abandoned the aim of using DPS entirely, presumably because RAM and cycles got cheap.
Separately, another project called DPS/X (
https://dps.sourceforge.net/index-old.html) notes that it doesn't support the alpha channel features required by NeXT, but it
did run gtkDPS and GNUstep 0.6.6 demos from its era, which seems to be circa 2001. It also mentions:
QuoteOPENSTEP for Solaris will not run until we implement the NeXT extensions.
Although it later contradicts this, and lists OPENSTEP for Solaris among compatible software. I'm inclined to believe the two specific negative mentions over a general inclusion.
Notably there's no mention of support for NeXT or OPENSTEP clients, though they are acknowledged as existing: DPS/X says they should be sent to GNUstep instead. DPS support may have been a goal of the GNUstep project before Steve ditched DPS for Quartz, but all of the development in that direction essentially died off in a mass extinction after OS X 10.0 was released.
Unfortunately there does not seem to be any documentation on how NXHost actually works. Presumably it uses SunRPC to speak to Mach dispatch, like everything else.