Orchid XP v8 schrieb:

>>> - PostScript was invented 10 years before laser printers existed. (It 
>>> was apparently designed specifically with laser printers in mind, as 
>>> I had always believed.)
>>
>> You're wrong here: The first laser printer dates back to 1969, while 
>> even the roots of PostScript date no further back than 1976. 
>> Furthermore, the language was initially targeted at the offset 
>> printing industry to drive Computer-to-Film imagesetters, and was only 
>> later adapted to laser printers.
> 
> Wikipedia suggests that it was developed specifically for laser 
> printing. (I may be wrong on the date that laser printers were 
> *invented*, but they did not become common until very, very much later. 
> Not unlike C++, apparently...)

Well, /my/ Wikipedia claims otherwise - see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#History:

"Warnock left with Chuck Geschke and founded Adobe Systems in December 
1982. They created a simpler language, similar to InterPress, called 
PostScript, which went on the market in 1984. At about this time they 
were visited by Steve Jobs, who urged them to /adapt PostScript to be 
used as the language for driving laser printers/."

(emphasis added)

Laser printers were originally invented not for quality, but for sheer 
speed (I guess they were the first printers to feature only rotating 
parts, with no linear movement whatsoever, so no acceleration was needed 
when "geared up" for printing), and were found at data centers for quite 
a while.

And, as mentioned, there were other areas of use for PostScript before that.


>>  - Perl predates the Internet by half a decade. (WTF?) I can only imagine
>>> it began life as a Unixy text-munging system in the style of awk, 
>>> sed, etc.
>>
>> You surely mean it predates the /World Wide Web/ by half a decade.
> 
> Before the WWW, nobody outside the millitary knew the Internet existed.

Many university students did, and certainly virtually all informatics 
students. The Internet had long grown beyond its roots in the ARPANET 
into the scientific world, as a tool for file and e-mail transfer as 
well as remote access to other universities' data centers. First 
commercial use of Internet dates back to 1988. Usenet became part of the 
Internet before the WWW era, too. Porn was exchanged via the internet on 
a more-or-less regular basis years before the first HTTP server was set up.


>>> - JavaScript predates Java. (WTF?!)
>>
>> ... under the titles "Mocha" and later "LiveScript", yes. The name 
>> JavaScript wasn't coined until December 1995 - when Java was already 
>> released to the public (not in 1996, as your chart implies) - probably 
>> in an attempt to benefit from the Java hype of those days.
> 
> What do you mean "probably"? ;-) The language is utterly unrelated to 
> Java in any way...

Well, "probably" in the sense of "sounds pretty likely, even though 
nobody can give proof".


> I mean the Internet becoming known by the general public. ("The 
> Internet" can be traced back to a secret classified military project 
> which was probably around for *decades* before this, knowing the US 
> millitary...)

That would have been the ARPANET, with the first data link being 
established in 1969.

However, that's just the root of the /technology/. The first nucleus of 
the actual network that later came to be known as the Internet - the 
NSFNET - was established in 1985 (with a 56 kBit/s backbone - imagine 
that!), linking 6 university computing centers.

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