John Warnock, an Adobe Systems founder whose innovations in computer graphics, including the ubiquitous PDF, made today’s visually rich digital experiences possible, died Aug. 19 at his home in Los Altos, Calif. He is 82 years old.
The cause is pancreatic cancer, Adobe, which Dr. Warnock in 1982 with Chuck Geschke, said in a statement.
Until Dr. Warnock and Adobe, desktop printing is a difficult, expensive and unpleasant endeavor. Users rely on either a screechy dot-matrix printer, with its pixelated text, or a specialized typesetting machine, which can cost $10,000 and take up most of a room.
Dr. made Warnock’s protocols loaded themselves into desktop printers, and accurately rendered what a computer sent them. Adobe’s first protocol, PostScript, made its way into Apple’s revolutionary LaserWriter, released in 1985, and for several years was the industry standard.
PostScript, licensed to hundreds of software and hardware companies, helped make Adobe rich. But the company was largely unknown to the public until 1993, when it released Acrobat, a program designed to render and read files in what it called Portable Document Format, or PDF.
PDF is the result of the ongoing fascination of Dr. Warnock since graduate school: finding a way to ensure that graphics displayed on one computer — whether words or images — look exactly the same on another computer, or on a page from a printer, regardless of manufacturer.
“It is a holy grail in computer science to know how to communicate documents,” he said in a 2019 interview at Oxford University.
Acrobat and PDF were not an immediate success, although Adobe made Acrobat Reader free to download. The company’s board wanted to retire them, but Dr. Warnock.
“I think the crossover point is if I can go to General Motors and say, ‘I can deliver your information faster and cheaper than you can do it on paper,'” he told The New York Times in 1991 . “You’re talking about saving tens of millions of dollars.”
PDF eventually became the standard, as the ease of sharing crisp, accurate documents across computer systems made the long-desired paperless office a reality.
Although Adobe is best known for PDF, it owes its dominance in the software industry to a whole range of design programs championed by Dr. Warnock over the years, including InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Taken together, these programs helped make the modern personal computing experience what it is, turning what was once a soup of obscure commands and monochromatic images into an engaging aesthetic experience.
“The computer has been turned into a machine that we can use to produce visual and print culture, which has never been designated,” David Brock, the director of curatorial affairs at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., said in a telephone interview. “That’s where he was really instrumental.”
John Edward Warnock was born on Oct. 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 is an admittedly average high school student who manages to flunk ninth grade algebra. However, he studied mathematics at the University of Utah, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1961 and a master’s in the same subject in 1964.
At first he didn’t plan to go into technology. But a grueling summer job during graduate school spent recapping tires prompted him to apply to IBM, which was recruiting mathematicians.
He returned to Utah to pursue a doctorate in mathematics, but after a few years he switched to electrical engineering, which at the time encompassed computer science. The university recently received a massive influx of money and resources from the Department of Defense to work on computer graphics, a field that piqued his interest.
He was especially drawn to the question of how to render a three-dimensional image in two dimensions. The result is the Warnock’s 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 survives him, as do his daughter, Alyssa; his sons, Christopher and Jeffrey; and four grandchildren.
Received by Dr. Warnock earned his doctorate in 1969 and then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for a company founded by two of his mentors in Utah, David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland. After they asked him to move to the company’s office in Salt Lake City, he decided to stay in California instead and worked at Xerox, whose Palo Alto Research Center then pioneered the first personal computers.
There he met Dr. Geschke, and the two became fast friends. Dr. Warnock spent years working on how to get printers to render an image from a computer screen, a seemingly simple issue that had puzzled computer scientists for years. (Dr. Geschke died in 2021.)
But when he presented his solution, InterPress, to his bosses, they weren’t interested in taking it public. He and Dr. Geschke, who worked on the project, was shocked.
“I went into his office, and I said, ‘We can either live in the world’s greatest sandbox for the rest of our lives, or we can do something about it,'” said Dr. Warnock in a 2018 interview at the Computer History Museum.
They both quit, and in late 1982 they founded Adobe Systems, named for a creek near Dr.’s home. Warnock. As of 2023, it will have a market capitalization of $235 billion, making it one of the largest information-technology 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. Geschke, who runs the company as an equal, are rare exceptions to the outsize egos and eccentric zillionaires of Silicon Valley: avuncular and academic, they have built an aggressively competitive company while consistently ranking high on lists of best places to work
Despite its size, Adobe is often cast as David against larger Goliaths, usually Microsoft — which, unlike Apple, has repeatedly rejected Dr. Warnock to cooperate and instead tried to defeat Adobe with its own protocols and programs. None of them worked.
Dr. Warnock, who has 20 patents to his name, stepped down as chief executive in 2001 but remained on Adobe’s board of directors.
“Being a CEO of a company over $1 billion is not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said in an interview at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. “The thing I really enjoy is the process of invention. I enjoy knowing how to do things that other people don’t know how to do.”