John Warnock

Cofounder and former cochairman of Adobe

• Born: October 6, 1940
• Place of Birth: Salt Lake City, Utah
• Died: August 19, 2023
• Place of Death: Los Altos, CA

Primary Company/Organization: Adobe

Introduction

As founder, chief executive officer (CEO) until 2000, and cochairman of the board until 2017 of Adobe Systems, John Warnock was one of the major designers of computer software. He was behind the design of the portable document format (PDF), which has transformed the sharing of computer files and, through the digitization of books, journals, and newspapers, transformed access to scholarship for academicians and general readers around the world. Warnock's success came from making the Adobe Reader for Adobe Acrobat freely available, and then charging for the “maker” program.

Early Life

John Edward Warnock was born on October 6, 1940, at Salt Lake City, Utah. He then went to the University of Utah, where he earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy in 1961 and then his master's degree in mathematics in 1964, studying under David Evans and others. Warnock's master's thesis was about providing a theorem for a problem that had been posed by U.S. mathematician Nathan Jacobson in 1956. Warnock had to solve the Jacobson radical for row-finite matrices. His thesis was finished in 1964. Subsequently, this work, coauthored with N. E. Sexauer, was published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.

In 1963, when he was completing his master's thesis, Warnock managed to get a summer job recapping car tires for Firestone. He was later to recall that “working there was hot, dirty and incredibly noisy” and he left after three weeks. He then managed to get a job with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), which trained him in Seattle and Los Angeles. He then decided to go back to the university for his doctorate. He married soon afterward and worked in the computer center at the university. Warnock completed his doctoral thesis in electrical engineering (computer science) in 1969. In this thirty-two-page work, “A Hidden Surface Algorithm for Computer Generated Halftone Pictures,” he developed his own recursive subdivision algorithm (now called the Warnock algorithm) for hidden surface determination in computer graphics. Warnock initially decided to be a computer entrepreneur and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to work for Computer Sciences of Canada. He next worked briefly in Toronto before moving on to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Life's Work

In 1962, Warnock moved to California to work for Evans and Sutherland, a computer graphics company that was based in Salt Lake City. It had been established by David Evans and Ivan Sutherland, both professors at the University of Utah; Evans formerly taught Warnock, and the Sutherland had moved to Salt Lake City from Harvard. They were establishing a company that was working on the Illiac IV supercomputer project, which was involved in providing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with a flight simulator. This was later to be used as a flight simulator for aircraft pilots in training. The simulators quickly transformed computer graphics using technology that would contribute to simulation models for the military and large industrial companies.

During his time at Evans and Sutherland, Warnock, working with John Gaffney, developed a computer language that they called Design System. The company offered Warnock a promotion and a move back to Salt Lake City. Warnock and his wife wanted to remain in California, and Warnock therefore left the firm in 1978 to work as a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). There he met Charles M. “Chuck” Geschke, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and who had graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. Warnock had offered some of his ideas to Xerox, but Xerox did not want to invest the necessary time and money to commercialize the InterPress graphics languages. Xerox was using the languages and wanted to develop them for use by all their printers, whereas Warnock wanted to get the language widely accepted more quickly.

Warnock and Geschke decided to combine their knowledge to form a new company, Adobe Systems, Inc., which was founded on December 2, 1982. Warnock had helped develop some of the basis of the PostScript computer language at Evans and Sutherland, and this language was further developed at Adobe. Warnock wanted to popularize the program quickly so that it could be used by everybody, rather than restrict access, and he felt confident enough to publish it and offer support for other computer systems developers. This led to the file format that Warnock first called Camelot but later came to be known as the portable document format (PDF).

Camelot was launched in the spring of 1991. It allowed anybody to print an electronic document anywhere in the world, regardless of the local platform or printer used, and it would appear exactly as designed at the source. Adobe released a free program, Reader, that allowed anyone to view such documents; however, the company would charge for the programs required to adapt documents to PDF format. Updates to Reader remain freely downloadable over the Internet from Adobe's trusted site.

The PostScript technology and the use of PDF files made it easy to print text and images. It was quickly used for digital publications and then for the digitizing of print documents, including books. As the PDF system became popular, tens of thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers were digitized. The files themselves were often relatively small, which contributed to the ease of file transfer. In spite of the obvious need for such a system, Adobe Acrobat—the computer program used to create the PDF files was not initially very popular; although Warnock tried to impress executives at IBM with the importance of making documents available through his system, they were not very interested.

Warnock continued to develop and improve Acrobat, enhancing the programs by adding security features and allowing for optical character recognition—especially after Adobe managed to acquire OCR Systems, Inc., in 1992—which did add considerably to the size of the files. However, the issue of file size was evolving into an negligible one: Improvements in the Internet, as well as the availability of larger and larger hard drives on personal computers, made the need to minimize file size less and less important.

Adobe was listed on NASDAQ in 1986. Adobe's success prompted some companies to try to develop their own similar systems, but although a few became relatively popular, none achieved the widespread acceptance of PDF files. The sudden wealth in the company resulted in media coverage that may have contributed to Geschke's being kidnapped from the parking lot of the Adobe headquarters in Mountain View on the morning of May 26, 1992. A large ransom payment was handed over, but the kidnappers were followed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Geschke was freed. The two kidnappers were sentenced to imprisonment for life.

Under Warnock and Geschke, Adobe continued to grow with the further development of PDF and the design of Photoshop and Flash. Once PDF became the most widely used system for formatting documents, it became the basis of the digitization of vast databases, as well as several million books and journals. Some journals and newspapers are available in PDF daily, and there are an increasing number available only in PDF. Many journals also have digitized their back issues in PDF. This has resulted in PDF documents being used in scholarship and academic libraries around the world and cataloging of digitized “e-books” just as print copies are cataloged.

In 1994 Warnock oversaw the acquisition of Aldus and thus the page layout program InDesign. Over the next few years, QuarkXPress superseded PageMaker as the standard program used for publishing, and as publishers migrated from using out-of-house typesetting services to bringing these production tasks in house by using these programs (“desktop publishing”), Adobe focused on developing its own desktop publishing software, InDesign. Adobe was a natural source of this software, since most printers were now using PDF file formats. The first version was released in 1999 and has been regularly updated and enhanced since. It allows publishers to control the final page content, layout, design, and export to PDF format that is ready for the printer and, increasingly, e-book and online publication.

Warnock, who served as Adobe's chief executive officer (CEO) between 1982 and 2000 as well as its chief technical officer from 2000 to 2001, received a large number of awards. In 1989, he won the Software Systems Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1995, the University of Utah recognized him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award, and in 1999 he was inducted as a Fellow of ACM. The Bodleian Library at Oxford University inducted him as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. He and Geschke have been recipients of the annual Medal of Achievement Award of the American Electronics Association as well as the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest U.S. honor awarded to engineers and inventors. In 2010, they were jointly awarded the Marconi Prize. In 2017, both Warnock and Geschke stepped down as the cochairs of Adobe Systems.

Personal Life

Unlike many other computer entrepreneurs who have spoken of the influence of their parents and family, Warnock kept his personal life private. He married Marva around the time he started his doctorate at the University of Utah, where she earned her bachelor of science degree, and they had three children: daughter Alyssa and sons Christopher and Jeffrey. The couple donated 200,000 shares of Adobe Systems, valued at $5.7 million, to the University of Utah to build the John E. and Marva M. Warnock Engineering Building, which was completed in 2007 for the University of Utah College of Engineering. Warnock died on August 34, 2023, at the age of eighty-two.

Bibliography

Martin, Justin, Aditya Mittal, Michelle Richaud, and N. Dominic Taboada. “Adobe Systems Incorporated.” Strategic Management Cases: Competitiveness and Globalization. Mason: South-Western, 2012. 1–15. Print.

Pifner, Pamela S. Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit, 2003. Print.

Risen, Clay. "John Warnock, Inventor of the PDF, Dies at 82." The New York Times, 24 Aug. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/technology/john-warnock-dead.html. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Warnock, John. “Adobe Cofounder John Warnock on the Competitive Advantages of Aesthetics and the ‘Right’ Technology.” 20 Jan. 2010. Knowledge@Wharton. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.

Warnock, John. “John Warnock.” n.d. Programmers at Work. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.

Weil, David, ed. Leaders of the Information Age. New York: H. W. Wilson, 2003. Print.