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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Twelve states require community associations, such as homeowners associations or HOAs, to conduct periodic reserve studies. A reserve study is a financial planning tool for estimating an association’s ability to fund current and future planned maintenance costs for large projects, such as roofs, pools, and asphalt roads. An underfunded reserve may lead to special assessments. Yet, due to restrictions on how reserve accounts can be used, an over funded account denies funds that may be better used by the community or the individual homeowners. In this post, I describe the reserve study methodology, its strengths and weaknesses, and my recommendations for improvements.

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