John Warnock, founder of Adobe Systems, whose innovations in computer graphics, including ubiquitous PDFs, enabled today’s visually rich digital experiences, died August 19 at his home in Los Altos, California, at the age of 82. years.
Adobe, which Dr. Warnock started in 1982 with Chuck Geschke, said in a statement that the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Until the advent of Dr. Warnock and Adobe, desktop printing was a tedious, expensive, and unsatisfactory process. Users relied either on a stark dot-matrix printer, with its pixelated text, or on a specialized typesetting machine, which could cost $10,000 and take up most of the room.
Dr. Warnock developed protocols that, loaded into the desktop printers themselves, accurately displayed what the computer sent them. Adobe’s first protocol, PostScript, fed into Apple’s revolutionary LaserWriter, released in 1985, and within a few years became the industry standard.
PostScript, licensed to hundreds of hardware and software companies, helped make Adobe rich. But the company was largely unknown to the public until 1993, when it released Acrobat, a program designed to view and read files in what’s called the Portable Document Format, or PDF.
The PDF was the result of Dr. Warnock’s ongoing obsession since his graduation: finding a way to ensure that graphics displayed on one computer – whether words or pictures – look exactly the same on another computer, or on a page from a printer, no matter what. From the manufacturer.
“Figuring out how to communicate documents has been the holy grail of computer science,” he said. 2019 interview with the University of Oxford.
Acrobat and PDF weren’t immediately successful, even after Adobe made Acrobat Reader available for free download. The company’s board of directors wanted to retire them, but Dr. Warnock insisted.
“I think the point of intersection is if I can go to GM and say, ‘I can deliver your information more quickly and cheaply than you can deliver it on paper,'” he told the New York Times in 1991. “It’s about saving tens of millions of dollars.”
PDF eventually became a standard, as the ease of sharing clear, accurate documents across computer systems made the long-envisioned paperless office a reality.
Although Adobe is best known for the PDF format, it owes its dominance in the software industry to the whole suite of design software that Dr. Warnock has championed over the years, including InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.
Together, these programs helped make the modern personal computing experience what it is, transforming what was a mishmash of fuzzy commands and monochrome images into an aesthetically appealing experience.
“Turning a computer into a machine that we can use to produce visual and print culture hasn’t been possible before,” David Brock, director of curatorial affairs at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, said in a phone interview. . “This is where he was really instrumental.”
John Edward Warnock was born on October 6, 1940, in Holladay, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. His father, Clarence, was a lawyer. His mother, Dorothy (Van Dyke) Warnock, was a homemaker.
John was an average high school student who managed to fail his algebra class in the ninth grade. However, he studied mathematics at the University of Utah, earning his associate’s degree in 1961 and his master’s degree in the same subject in 1964.
He did not initially plan to get into the technology field. But a grueling summer job during graduate school repainting tires convinced him to apply to IBM, which recruited mathematicians.
He returned to Utah to obtain a PhD in mathematics, but after a few years switched to electrical engineering, which at the time included computer science. The university has recently received a huge influx of funds and resources from the Department of Defense to work in the field of computer graphics, an area that has taken his interest.
He was particularly fascinated by the question of how to render a hologram in two dimensions. And that was the result Warnock algorithma major step forward in computer graphics and the basis for some of his later work at Adobe.
He married Marva Mullins in 1965. She is survived by him, as well as by his daughter, Alyssa. His children are Christopher and Jeffrey. and four grandchildren.
Dr. Warnock earned his Ph.D. in 1969 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for a company founded in Utah by two of his mentors, David C. Evans and Evan Sutherland. After being asked to move to the company’s Salt Lake City office, he decided to stay in California instead and went to work for Xerox, whose Palo Alto Research Center was then a pioneer in the manufacture of the first personal computers.
There he met Dr. Jechki, and the two became fast friends. Dr. Warnock has spent years working out how to get printers to display an image from a computer screen, a seemingly easy problem that has puzzled computer scientists for years. (Dr. Jishki passed away in 2021).
But when he presented his solution, InterPress, to his bosses, they weren’t interested in making it public. He and Dr. Jeschke, who worked on the project, were grieving.
“I went into his office, and I said, ‘We can live in the largest sandy environment in the world for the rest of our lives, or we can do something about it,’” Dr. Warnock said in a 2018 interview with the Museum of Computer History. .
They both quit, and in late 1982 founded Adobe Systems, named after a small creek near Dr. Warnock’s home. In 2023, it will have a market capitalization of $235 billion, making it one of the largest IT companies in the world.
In 2009, President Barack Obama presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Dr. Warnock and Dr. Geschke.
Dr. Warnock and Dr. Jeschke, who ran the company as equals, were rare exceptions among Silicon Valley’s big egos and eccentric billionaires: They built a fiercely competitive company while consistently ranking high on lists of best places to work. a job.
Despite its size, Adobe has often been portrayed as David versus much larger giants, most often Microsoft — which, unlike Apple, has repeatedly rejected Dr. Warnock’s pleas for cooperation and instead tries to beat Adobe with its own protocols and software. None of them worked.
Dr. Warnock, who held 20 patents to his name, stepped down as CEO in 2001 but remains on the Adobe board.
“Being CEO of a billion-dollar company isn’t all you can be,” he said in an interview with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. “The thing I really enjoy is the process of inventing. I enjoy figuring out how to do things that other people don’t know how to do.”