Many corporations and agencies allocate a certain amount of their budget towards the creation of public artwork. For instance, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has funded nearly 300 permanent art installations since 1982 under the city’s “Percent for Art” law. If we question the effectiveness of the program, we immediately run into problems of measuring the subjective aesthetic value of the creations.

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In December 2022, Adobe, through the Computer History Museum (CHM), released the source code for PostScript®, version 1.0. PostScript is one of the foundational technologies of the desktop publishing revolution of the early 1980s, along with laser printers, the graphical user interface of the Apple Macintosh, and Aldus PageMaker. PostScript is a programming language and a page description format for translating visual content into printed documents.

Adobe immediately enjoyed business success through licensing PostScript to laser printer manufacturers and it became the de facto digital publishing format. While multiple histories have studied this event through a business lens, what historical questions may be answered through the source code? Further, as software practitioners, what can we learn from the source code to apply to present and future designs?

We argue:

1. PostScript’s design and implementation benefited from a long lineage of other software programs (as Adobe has always admitted),
2. The software architecture aligned with the interests of creatives, printer services, and printer manufacturers,
3. Design choices, including modularity and semantics, added value to the product, and
4. Pursuing the “print anything” objective, rather than page printing throughput, yielded a superior implementation.

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ZLister, a to-do list management application, is now available. ZLister allows you to create lists with entries and entries can be marked complete or incomplete (“to do”). ZLister’s user interface is designed for mobile devices, but may also be used on the desktop. ZLister does not store your data in the cloud and can run offline.

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I’ve started studying a larger historical code base. Within this post, I want to summarize the sort of historical questions we might ask and notes on how to approach them.

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