by DonHopkins | 2025-06-03 17:57:43+00:00
PostScript is great for user interfaces!

I've written lots and lots of user interfaces in PostScript. Just not Display PostScript. NeWS was a lot better for making interactive user interfaces than Display PostScript, and it came out a lot earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (entirely written in PostScript):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

PizzaTool PostScript Source code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

I also worked on HyperLook, which was like HyperCard for NeWS with colorful PostScript instead of black and white pixels, plus networking:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...

Discussion with Alan Kay about HyperLook and NeWS:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browse...

Then I used HyperLook to implemented the user interface for SimCity, programming the entire interactive user interface in NeWS PostScript -- Display PostScript couldn't do anything like that:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcr...

Several years before that, I worked on the NeWS version of Gosling Emacs at UniPress, with multiple tabbed windows and pie menus. (Gosling also wrote NeWS, and much later Java.):

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

The source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 recently surfaced! (We called the NeWS version of Emacs "NeMACS" of course.):

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS

Here's the PostScript code of the NeWS Emacs display driver:

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/Trm...

And lots of other fun interactive PostScript user interface code we shipped with NeMACS:

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/tree/main/ps

Pie menus:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/pie.ps

Tabbed windows:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/tab.ps

I used UniPress Emacs to develop an authoring tool for the NeWS version of HyperTIES, an early hypermedia browser, which we developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

I also worked on the Gnu Emacs 18 NeWS driver for The NeWS Toolkit:

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps

A visual PostScript programming and debugging environment: The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

PSIBER source code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/litecyber/

NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS more coherently:

1) Used PostScript CODE instead of JavaScript for PROGRAMMING.

2) Used PostScript GRAPHICS instead of DHTML and CSS for RENDERING.

3) Used PostScript DATA instead of XML and JSON for DATA REPRESENTATION.

More on that:

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

Here's a comparison of X-Windows and NeWS:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...