This was such an amazing book. I had bought the paper copy and the page where they showed how to put text on a circle was amazing. It is so well written and easy to follow.

Reading it for the first time now, I get sort of the same kind of feeling that I got when I first read the K&R C book.

Was there a more affordable way of running PostScript code back then than buying a (1985) $6,995 Apple Laser Printer?

GhostScript was 88, Sun NeWS was 86ish, and Adobe Distiller was 1993. I had an Intel NeXTSTEP 3.3 machine in 95.

Did you/people in general think NeWs made sense, performance-wise? What was the general belief back then?

Don't know about NeWS, but Display Postscript was performant.

I guess I had just always assumed that NeWs was slow.

I think the performance of Display Postscript in OpenStep / NeXTSTEP was a indicator that NeWS didn't have to be slow. It would be interesting to have a version of it today to test.