I was saddened to hear about the passing of Adobe founder John Warnock this weekend. John was one of the pioneers of the modern computer industry and was largely responsible for making computer documents look as good as the best documents from a traditional printing press.
I first met John in late 1984, when Steve Jobs showed me the LaserWriter, Apple's first laser printer. He was particularly proud of the quality of the fonts it could produce, and he introduced me to John and his partner Chuck Geschke, who had created the PostScript language. This is "God's own Helvetica!," Jobs told me.
Remember at this point, most people were printing from their PCs using either dot-matrix printers, which had a very limited number of typefaces, most looking horrible; or from devices that looked like typewriters, and could produce just a single font at a time.
Canon had created the LBP-CX, a desktop laser printer engine, in 1983; and HP introduced the first desktop laser printer, the first LaserJet in the spring of 1984. Apple wanted to do something better, and particularly wanted a printer that could match the fonts in its Lisa and Macintosh computers.
Warnock had been working on computer typography since the mid 1970s, first at Evans & Sutherland, and then at Xerox PARC. Unable to convince Xerox to commercialize a solution called InterPress, he and Geschke started Adobe Systems in December 1982. There they created a simpler version called PostScript. Jobs saw the software and licensed it for the LaserWriter, which was announced in January, 1985. Read PCMag's first guide to PostScript from April 1991.
The rest of the decade saw a revolution in what we called "desktop publishing," spurred on by the introduction of Aldus PageMaker (later bought by Adobe) in July 1985. This was followed by the introduction of Adobe Illustrator in early 1987, which really showed off what could be created in PostScript. Both on the Mac and on the emerging Microsoft Windows platform, desktop publishing and computer graphics became much more popular as all the high end printers adopted PostScript.
In 1989, PC Magazine named Warnock, its Person of the Year, saying:
"John Warnock knew what he wanted a long time ago: high-resolution control over output devices. From his CAD work at Evans & Sutherland to his projects at Xerox PARC to Adobe, he's worked steadily toward one goal: PostScript. Aside from all the controversy about font technology, PostScript goes far beyond—to a full-blown page description language. PostScript has given new meaning to the term 'device independence' and has fulfilled the laser printer's potential in ways that its investor never planned. PostScript has taken the mystique out of typesetting while creating a whole new skill set for designers and graphics artists. We commend Warnock for his lifelong vision and the standards he has set."
The controversy about fonts that the editors alluded to dealt with Microsoft and Apple coming up with an alternative to PostScript known as TrueType, which remains a part of modern operating systems. That dealt a big blow to Adobe, and I remember seeing Warnock get teary and later combative in fighting for PostScript, although in the end he lost.
Warnock had another trick up his sleeve: a method of embedding text formats and images within documents that could be opened on any computer platform. (Up until then, documents were dependent on the fonts installed on a particular system.) Warnock headed up the team that created the portable document format, or PDF, introduced in 1993, along with software to create and view it, called Adobe Acrobat. (Here's PC Magazine's review of the first version from September 1993.)
It took several years for the PDF format to take off—years in which Adobe made the specification public and introduced a free Reader. Throughout that period, I remember Warnock as a tireless advocate for the format. In the end, he prevailed—the format took off, and is still widely used today.
Warnock stepped down as CEO of Adobe in 2001, but I remember him as a passionate, creative executive who made a far bigger impact on the computing technology we all use than most people recognize.
Here's PCMag's obituary.