John Warnock, who helped invent PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, dies. He is 82 years old.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and computer scientist died Saturday surrounded by his family, Adobe said in a statement. The company did not give or disclose the cause of Warnock’s death.
“John’s talent and innovation have left an indelible mark on Adobe, the tech industry and the world,” Adobe said.
Warnock worked at Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke built a company in 1982 around a rejected idea. Nearly a decade later, Warnock outlined an early version of the Portable Document Format (PDF), changing the way documents are exchanged.
Warnock, from Holladay, a suburb of Salt Lake City, described himself as an average student who went on to excel in math.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a doctorate in electrical engineering or computer science from the University of Utah, and has maintained close ties to his hometown since his retirement as Adobe’s CEO.
In 2013, Warnock told Continuum, the University of Utah alumni magazine, that Warnock was the son of a well-known local lawyer but had been a regular until a teacher at Olympus High School took an interest in him. student.
“I had a fantastic teacher in high school who completely changed my life,” Warnock said. “He was really good at making you fall in love with math, and I’ve been into math ever since.”
He was still a self-proclaimed “mediocre” student when he got his BA in mathematics and philosophy, but he made grades in his master’s.
In 1964, he solved the Jacobsen radical, an abstract algebra problem that had remained a mystery since it was posed eight years earlier. The following year, he met his wife, Marva Mullins, whom he married five weeks later.
After working a summer at a tire shop, he decided the low-paying field of academia wasn’t for him, so he applied for a job at IBM and began training in computer science. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah, where he joined a group of cutting-edge researchers working on Internet pioneers funded by the Department of Defense in the 1960s. Even so, Warnock continued to work on rendering the images on a computer.
In the late 1970s, Warnock moved to Palo Alto, California, to work on interactive computer graphics for Xerox. There he met Geschke and began developing InterPress, a printing and graphics protocol that they believed would be the wave of the future. When Xerox hesitated, they decided to create their own company.
They founded Adobe in 1982 and created PostScript, the program that made small-scale printing feasible for the first time. The company later created PDF, which allowed people to create electronic versions of documents that could be saved and sent to other users, who could search and view them.
Adobe then took off, and PDFs eventually replaced many paper copies in legal, business, and personal correspondence.
Before Warnock stepped down as CEO in 2000, other iconic programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop followed. He and Geschke served as co-chairs of the company’s board of directors until 2017, while Warnock served as a board member until his death.
Adobe Chairman and CEO Shantanu Narayen said in an email to company employees: “John is widely regarded as one of the greatest inventors of our generation, having revolutionized how we communicate using words, images and video. Tremendous influence.”
After retirement, Warnock and his wife devoted more time to hobbies such as collecting rare books, many of which he scanned and posted on rarebookroom.org. They also collected Native American art, including moccasins, shirts and beadwork, which toured the country.
Warnock is survived by his wife and three children.
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