My first "desktop publishing" experience was using troff on Unix and sending output to the university's phototypsetter. Then, in the second half of the 1980s, I worked at a Fortune 200 company in the team rolling out PCs and networks across the company's many locations.
At the time, the basic choice was the HP laserjet with optional font cartridges (which were very expensive as I recall, something like $200 each in 1980s dollars), or the Apple laserwriter which was something like $4K if I recall correctly, but had Postscript built in, so no need for hardware font cartridges.
So as a result, the HP hardware got rolled out to most offices where mostly what was needed was to print memos in default monospace font, while to make a nice looking newsletter, flyer, or brochure, you had to travel to headquarters to use the Apple printer.
My first printer was an HP LJ II+ with the PostScript cartridge. I had to buy extra RAM for it and for a while, I had more RAM in my printer than in my computer. A few years later, I bought a fancier PS printer that printed ledger size pages and handled duplex and again I had more RAM in my printer than in my computer. I used to occasionally write PS documents by hand (one was to print out country placards for the Model United Nations club at my college where for country names which were especially long, the text would be auto condensed.
These days, with the advent of printing subsystems in the GUI and the fact that software no longer needs to handle the printer directly, I don’t know if anyone ever buys PS printers at all anymore.
PDF, although it can resemble PostScript, is not PostScript. PostScript is a Forth-derived Turing-complete programming language that, in an era of generic printer drivers, offers little benefit anymore since it’s unlikely that an OS printer interface would take advantage of its capabilities. In the old days of programs managing printer output directly, it was handy to be able to do things like decompress TeX PK font bitmaps on the printer (or even more dramatically to send binary data for illustrations to be decoded and decompressed on the printer), but the set of printer primitives that are supported by OS printer APIs is constrained enough that nobody will do these sorts of things anymore. PDF is now essentially the lingua Franca of print interfaces and the programmability of PostScript is more a liability than a benefit.
I was delighted to discover a full chapter dedicated to troff in a textbook I picked up on Berkeley Unix. Raw documents written in troff (the ones that I’ve seen) seem so quaint. Like little homemade chicken pot pies.
I’m mixed on the state of desktop publishing today. I’m missing that quaintness.
I wasn't aware there was a state of desktop publishing today. DTP has mostly been superseded by the web. DIY amateur print of posters and such is more likely to be hammered together in Word than in Indesign.
Design agencies still do design-for-print, but there's usually an integrated workflow of some kind which means web and print assets - including styles - can be shared and reused.
It's a long way from the blocky output of a 300dpi laser in the early 90s assembled on a PC running a $50 DTP suite.
The sad thing about Postscript is that it could have been the foundation of the web, which would have made web and print integration much simpler and design more straightforward and consistent.
Instead we got the sprawling incoherent catastrophe that is HTML/CSS/js for the web, PDF for most other document-ish things, and Epub (which is a dumbed down and DRM'd version of HTML etc) for digital book publishing.
At the time, the basic choice was the HP laserjet with optional font cartridges (which were very expensive as I recall, something like $200 each in 1980s dollars), or the Apple laserwriter which was something like $4K if I recall correctly, but had Postscript built in, so no need for hardware font cartridges.
So as a result, the HP hardware got rolled out to most offices where mostly what was needed was to print memos in default monospace font, while to make a nice looking newsletter, flyer, or brochure, you had to travel to headquarters to use the Apple printer.