Back in my day, real cowboys wrote their papers in PostScript, making their papers as inaccessible as possible for user of consumer-grade devices. /s
PS won on human readability and editability but lost on portability to Adobe's own internal competitor, PDF, and because it fought and lost to (La)TeX -> PDF & (La)TeX -> DVI -> PS.
PS: I once printed out and bound the PDF 1.3 spec[0] on 24 lbs. bleached dead trees on an HP LaserJet IIIP with over a million page count. Some of the nuclear engineers and scientists an office containing <50 people routinely printed thousand page documents every week.
/j