From: Jon Forrest <nobozo@gmail.com>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 09:34:11 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <34f3d83f-c33e-83de-cb59-12209a7ff729@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <31617.1613048783@hop.toad.com>
On 2/11/2021 5:06 AM, John Gilmore wrote:
> This reminded me of a project that I and a small team did in the 1980s.
> We were licensees of Sun's NeWS source code, and we wanted our software
> to be able to use the wide variety of fonts sold commercially by Adobe
> and font design companies. The problem was, they were encoded in Adobe
> Type 1 font definitions, which Adobe considered a proprietary trade
> secret.
>
> Our team ended up pulling the ROMs out of an original LaserWriter, and
> writing and improving a 68000 disassembler. One of our team members
> read the code, figured out which parts handled these fonts, and how it
> decoded them. He wrote that down in his own words in a plain text
> document, not a program, following the prevailing court decisions about
> how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret.
> Ultimately, we released that document to some interested people, so that
> others could implement support for Type 1 fonts. Shortly afterward,
> Adobe magnanimously decided to "release the specification", as Wikipedia
> says.
I always thought the Prof. Michael Harrison and his group in the
CS Dept. at UC Berkeley were the first to do this. I found a reference
to this in
https://books.google.com/books?id=IToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7&dq=michael++harrison+berkeley+postscript+fonts#v=onepage&q=michael%20%20harrison%20berkeley%20postscript%20fonts&f=false
Plus, Mike told me personally that this is what happened.
Jon
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-02-11 17:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 65+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-11-30 3:10 [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976) Joachim via TUHS
2020-11-30 8:30 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-11-30 13:36 ` Brantley Coile
2020-11-30 15:12 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2020-11-30 15:52 ` Clem Cole
2020-11-30 16:25 ` Dan Cross
2020-11-30 16:38 ` Warner Losh
2020-11-30 16:41 ` Dan Cross
2020-11-30 16:37 ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-30 16:54 ` Clem Cole
2020-11-30 18:13 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-11-30 18:25 ` John Cowan
2020-11-30 18:37 ` Clem Cole
2020-11-30 20:11 ` arnold
2020-11-30 21:49 ` Will Senn
2020-12-01 2:55 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-11-30 18:46 ` Nemo Nusquam
2021-02-10 20:48 ` [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable (was: The UNIX Command Language (1976)) Greg A. Woods
2021-02-10 21:44 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-10 22:05 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-11 21:58 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-02-12 5:22 ` George Michaelson
2021-02-12 22:13 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-12 22:18 ` Ron Natalie
2021-02-10 22:36 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-02-10 23:05 ` George Michaelson
2021-02-11 0:27 ` Ron Natalie
2021-02-11 0:36 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-11 1:53 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-11 1:59 ` Richard Salz
2021-02-11 2:04 ` George Michaelson
2021-02-11 2:44 ` Richard Salz
2021-02-11 3:02 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-02-11 4:07 ` Toby Thain
2021-02-11 16:55 ` Ron Natalie
2021-02-11 20:27 ` John Cowan
2021-02-11 2:30 ` [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable Mary Ann Horton
2021-02-11 2:52 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-11 6:42 ` Andrew Hume
2021-02-11 7:12 ` Rob Pike
2021-02-11 13:06 ` John Gilmore
2021-02-11 17:34 ` Jon Forrest [this message]
2021-02-11 18:09 ` John Cowan
2021-02-11 18:43 ` Rich Morin
2020-12-01 3:59 ` [TUHS] The UNIX Command Language (1976) jason-tuhs
2020-12-01 4:03 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-12-01 9:27 ` Steve Nickolas
2020-12-01 15:09 ` Jim Capp
2020-12-01 15:35 ` Toby Thain
2020-12-01 15:38 ` arnold
2020-12-01 16:24 ` Warner Losh
2020-12-01 16:39 ` arnold
2020-12-01 20:13 ` Rob Pike
2020-12-02 7:08 ` arnold
2020-12-02 7:29 ` Rob Pike
2020-12-01 20:20 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-12-01 20:39 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-01 21:24 ` Dan Cross
2020-12-01 23:44 ` John Cowan
2020-12-12 19:50 ` scj
2020-12-01 16:47 ` Larry McVoy
2020-12-01 20:13 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-12-01 20:49 ` John Cowan
2020-12-01 16:04 ` Tyler Adams
2021-02-11 12:52 [TUHS] troff was not so widely usable Nelson H. F. Beebe
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