Adobe co-founder and former CEO John Warnock has died
Slashdot reader Dave Knott wrote:
John Warnock, co-founder and former CEO of Adobe, has died at the age of 82. During his tenure, Adobe created Postscript, Acrobat, Photoshop, and many other software technologies and products that became industry standards in publishing and graphic design. Video editing, photography and more. The cause of death has not been revealed. He is survived by his wife, graphic designer Marva Warnock, and three children
Slashdot covered the death of Adobe co-founder Charles ‘Chuck’ Geschke in 2021:
Started in co-founder John Warnock’s garage in 1982, the company is named after Adobe Creek that was located behind Warnock’s house, and offers pioneering capabilities in “what you see is what you get” (or WYSIWYG) desktop publishing… (Gizmodo) writes ) After earning his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Jeschke met Warnock while working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, according to the Mercury News.
“In the spring of 1991, Dr. John Warnock wrote a paper he called ‘Camelot’ in which the co-founder and CEO of Adobe Systems laid the foundation for what became Acrobat/PDF,” recalls this 2002 Slashdot post.Last year, the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum publicly released “for the first time, the source code for the advanced printing technology, PostScript. We thank Adobe, Inc. for its permission and support, and John Warnock for supporting this release….
From the inception of Adobe Systems Incorporated (now known as Adobe, Inc.) exactly forty years ago, in December 1982, the company’s founders envisioned a new kind of printing press—essentially a digital printing press, using the latest advances in computing. Co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock worked with computer makers such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Apple to convince them that software was the key to the new digital printing machine. Their vision: Any computer could communicate with printers and printing devices via a common language to print words and words. Highest resolution images. Led by Warnock, Adobe assembled a team of skilled and creative programmers to create this new language. In addition to the co-founders, the team included Doug Brotz, Bill Paxton, and Ed Taft. The language they created was, in fact, a full-fledged programming language, called PostScript, and was released by Adobe in 1984.
By treating everything to be printed the same way, in a common mathematical description, PostScript gave capabilities that were not available anywhere else. Text and images can be resized, rotated, and moved as desired, as in the opening image of this article. Adobe licensed PostScript to computer makers and printer manufacturers, and the business catapulted into a period of hypergrowth….
Today, most printers rely on PostScript technology either directly or through a technology it grew out of: PDF (Portable Document Format). John Warnock championed the development of PDF in the 1990s, transforming PostScript into a safer, easier-to-use technology as the basis for digital documents, while retaining all the benefits of interoperability, fidelity, and quality.
