CompuServe Messages

You've kinda stumbled into the other part of the motivation for Apple/Microsoft alliance (other than "squash Adobe"). If Apple did a proprietary PDL, it wouldn't go beyond Apple hardware. Same for Microsoft, whose market is deeply rooted in 80×86 (MS-DOS, OS/2). The "generalist" vendors such as Linotype, QMS, et al, would have little motivation to invest engineering and marketing resources in niche markets defined in this protective and proprietary way. One of the big, big successes of PostScript is that it is a truly hardware-independent language. Even more so than Unix/C, which were _supposed_ to be platform-independent, but ended up with implementation problems in dependent library supersets and the requirement for non-trivial amounts of hardware resources. Actually, this is in itself an indictment against the Apple/MS venture. Adobe had no particular axe to grind in the creation of PostScript, which is greatly evident in its industry-wide acceptance. Apple and Microsoft have a _definite_ agenda to service, and it's not necessarily the creation of a new advanced PDL, unfortunately. I don't particularly see the Suns, IBMs and NeXTs of the world jumping behind this unholy alliance. As much as Scully and Gates think they may have computing wrapped around their little fingers, I strongly suspect they're in for a rude awakening. While there are several of you knowledgable folks out there who strongly disagree, I will stick to my guns: we've seen this scenario before – the Apple/MS PDL has all the makings of another OS/2. …mm