Yes, there were raster graphics printers before PostScript. What PostScript did was to revolutionize the printing industry, by creating a page description language that could combine raster graphics, vector graphics, and vector-scalable fonts. Aldus took one look at it, Adobe fonts, and the Mac, and saw the opportunity to build a page layout tool. That became PageMaker.

Meanwhile, Linotype Hell, Compugraphics, and others built PostScript imagesetters that could do with a laser what used to take about ten steps to do manually, and photographically, in traditional offset printing companies.

I followed all this as a user and systems implementer in the yearbook and school portrait industry. We put a lot of early desktop publishing tools in our companies. We had HUGE respect for Adobe, at the same time they annoyed the crap out of us.

Canon, HP, Tektronix, and many others had their own page description languages for office laser printers, but suddenly found that they needed to license PostScript or a near-exact clone of it to compete.

PageMaker and its key competitor, QuarkXPress, took over the pre-press world and the "desktop publishing" revolution was underway in the mid-to-late 1980s. Adobe developed the PDF file format to move PostScript pages from pre-press people to printing houses. Later, the format would became ubiquitous for replacing direct mail marketing and reference documents with online downloads. My wife works in marketing. Her company replaced a warehouse full of literature with a web server stocked with PDFs of the same literature! Bits beat atoms...

PostScript clone makers soon popped up like weeds. Some clones were awful, but others would do *almost* everything PostScript could do. In 1990, I put a massive 92 page per minute Kodak LED printer in our photo lab, to make millions of portrait package quality guarantee inserts each month in the fall. It was a PostScript clone, so we had to avoid certain characters. Later, we swapped it for a pair of 45 PPM Océ printers that used a different engine capable of personalizing PostScript documents from our mainframe data. They were all driven by Adobe PageMaker running on a few Macs.

I put a Tektronix wax thermal PostScript printer in our marketing department for quick proofing uses. The IT guy got mad when I figured out it ran three times faster via TCP/IP than it did on our standard Novell Netware network print server, and without slowing down the rest of the network. (God, I hated Novell! What a scam... I'm so glad the rest of the IT universe figured that out.)

I put a Linotype Hell film imagesetter in the lab to make title overlays for group pictures on line film. Later, I set up a system of Canon color copiers driven with Fiery PostScript raster image processors from images on our Kodak DP2 lab software servers and personalized data merged by a third party app, Planet Press. They made all of our portrait proofs.

We had 12 PCs running Photoshop for portrait retouching (and for spotting scans of film images in the early 2000s). In 1999, we had 30 Macs doing pre-press prep in PageMaker, driven from a MS FoxPro database, putting together memory book (elementary school yearbook) portrait panel pages. Output was to a Compugraphic film imagesetter at our printing plant.

None of that would have been possible without PostScript and Adobe software. May Mr. Geschke rest in peace and not be forgotten for his leadership and contributions.

That’s a great history Bill - thanks for the information. I was on the T&M (test and measurement) side of Tektronix, but was familiar with their graphic products and used to have a wax printer at home after they discontinued it (impossible to maintain). At one moment in time, Tektronix was a powerhouse in graphics with their Plot 50 SW and they were a leader in storing images on the face of a CRT and dominated that technology. All that changed when RAM became cheap and digital images were stored in RAM instead of analog on the phosphor of a CRT, and Tek dropped out of the graphics business. Kind of similar to what happened to Kodak...