UniPress, RMS's arch enemy Evil Software Hoarder, sold a commercial version of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit as well as Gosling's Emacs.
https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-04-041
UniPress made a PostScript back-end for ACK that they marketed with the NeWS version Emacs, whose slogan was "C for yourself: PostScript for NeWS!"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838736
>UniPress ported and sold a commercial version of the "Extended Amsterdam Compiler Kit" for Andrew Tanenbaum for many CPUs and versions of Unix (like they also ported and sold his Unix version of Emacs for James Gosling), so Emacs might have been compiled with ACK on the Cray, but I don't recall.
>During the late 80's and early 90's, UniPress's Enhanced ACK cost $9,995 for a full source license, $995 for an educational source license, with front ends for C, Pascal, BASIC, Modula-2, Occam, and Fortran, and backends for VAX, 68020, NS32000, Sparc, 80368, and others, on many contemporary versions of Unix.
>Rehmi Post at UniPress also made a back-end for ACK that compiled C to PostScript for the NeWS window system and PostScript printers, called "c2ps", which cost $2,995 for binaries or $14,995 for sources.
>Independently Arthur van Hoff wrote a different C to PostScript compiler called "PdB" at the Turing Institute, not related to c2ps. It was a much simpler, more powerful, more direct compiler written from scratch, and it supported object oriented PostScript programming in NeWS, subclassing PostScript from C or C from PostScript. I can't remember how much Turing sold it for, but I think it was less than c2ps.
> cost $2,995 for binaries or $14,995 for sources
My goodness, this is hard to imagine from today when open source has driven the price of software (code itself) to nil. And that's the price from decades ago. While I'm glad I don't have to pay 15K for a C to PostScript compiler, as someone who might have written similar software if I'd lived back in those days - I can imagine an alternate timeline where I'd be getting paid to write such tools instead of doing it as a hobby project.
> NeScheme.txt
Nice rabbit hole about LispScript, what a cool idea. I've been re-studying Scheme recently, its history and variants like s7, and was appreciating its elegance and smallness as a language, how relevant it still is. One of the books I'm reading uses Scheme for algorithmic music composition. (Notes from the Metalevel: An Introduction to Computer Composition)