Adobe Co-founder and Ex-CEO John Warnock Has Died (theverge.com) 36
Slashdot reader Dave Knott writes:
John Warnock, co-founder and ex-CEO of Adobe, has died at the age of 82. Under his tenure, Adobe created Postscript, Acrobat, Photoshop, and many other technologies and software products that have become industry standards in publishing, graphic design, video editing, photography and more. A cause of death has not been released; he is survived by his wife, graphic designer Marva Warnock, and his three children
Slashdot covered the death of Adobe co-founder Charles 'Chuck' Geschke in 2021: The company started in co-founder John Warnock's garage in 1982, and was named after the Adobe Creek which ran behind Warnock's home, offering pioneering capabilities in "What you see is what you get" (or WYSIWYG) desktop publishing... [Gizmodo writes] after earning a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke 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 dubbed 'Camelot' in which the Adobe Systems Co-founder and CEO laid out the foundation for what has become Acrobat/PDF," remembers this 2002 Slashdot post.
And last year Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum publicly released "for the first time, the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript. We thank Adobe, Inc. for their permission and support, and John Warnock for championing this release.... From the start of Adobe Systems Incorporated (now Adobe, Inc.) exactly forty years ago in December 1982, the firm's cofounders envisioned a new kind of printing press â" one that was fundamentally digital, using the latest advances in computing. Initial discussions by cofounders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock with computer-makers such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Apple convinced them that software was the key to the new digital printing press. Their vision: Any computer could connect with printers and typesetters via a common language to print words and images at the highest fidelity. Led by Warnock, Adobe assembled a team of skillful and creative programmers to create this new language. In addition to the two cofounders, the team included Doug Brotz, Bill Paxton, and Ed Taft. The language they created was in fact a complete programming language, named PostScript, and was released by Adobe in 1984.
By treating everything to be printed the same, in a common mathematical description, PostScript granted abilities offered nowhere else. Text and images could be scaled, rotated, and moved at will, as in the opening image to this essay. Adobe licensed PostScript to computer-makers and printer manufacturers, and the business jumped into a period of hypergrowth....
Today, most printers rely on PostScript technology either directly or through a technology that grew out of it: PDF (Portable Document Format). John Warnock championed the development of PDF in the 1990s, transforming PostScript into a technology that was safer and easier to use as the basis for digital documents, but retaining all the benefits of interoperability, fidelity, and quality.
Slashdot covered the death of Adobe co-founder Charles 'Chuck' Geschke in 2021: The company started in co-founder John Warnock's garage in 1982, and was named after the Adobe Creek which ran behind Warnock's home, offering pioneering capabilities in "What you see is what you get" (or WYSIWYG) desktop publishing... [Gizmodo writes] after earning a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke 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 dubbed 'Camelot' in which the Adobe Systems Co-founder and CEO laid out the foundation for what has become Acrobat/PDF," remembers this 2002 Slashdot post.
And last year Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum publicly released "for the first time, the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript. We thank Adobe, Inc. for their permission and support, and John Warnock for championing this release.... From the start of Adobe Systems Incorporated (now Adobe, Inc.) exactly forty years ago in December 1982, the firm's cofounders envisioned a new kind of printing press â" one that was fundamentally digital, using the latest advances in computing. Initial discussions by cofounders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock with computer-makers such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Apple convinced them that software was the key to the new digital printing press. Their vision: Any computer could connect with printers and typesetters via a common language to print words and images at the highest fidelity. Led by Warnock, Adobe assembled a team of skillful and creative programmers to create this new language. In addition to the two cofounders, the team included Doug Brotz, Bill Paxton, and Ed Taft. The language they created was in fact a complete programming language, named PostScript, and was released by Adobe in 1984.
By treating everything to be printed the same, in a common mathematical description, PostScript granted abilities offered nowhere else. Text and images could be scaled, rotated, and moved at will, as in the opening image to this essay. Adobe licensed PostScript to computer-makers and printer manufacturers, and the business jumped into a period of hypergrowth....
Today, most printers rely on PostScript technology either directly or through a technology that grew out of it: PDF (Portable Document Format). John Warnock championed the development of PDF in the 1990s, transforming PostScript into a technology that was safer and easier to use as the basis for digital documents, but retaining all the benefits of interoperability, fidelity, and quality.
NeXTSTEP (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading about PostScript makes me remember that every year that passes, NeXTSTEP gains one year in advance of every other OS.
How that you may ask? Quite simple. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Meaning it displayed PostScript on the screen, and thus, everything you saw on screen would be printed the same way on paper or any other support.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
In advance or behind? Infinite flexibility sounds great until it holds you back. Some things require special purpose processing, e.g. fast smooth motion, 3D graphics etc. You don't want an inefficient processing pipeline just because there's a chance someone may want to print the screen.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, and MacOS uses Display PDF... for some elements.
Re: (Score:1)
And Apple borked display PDF so bad that John W. called Steve J. and asked if he could to send a couple of engineers over to Cupertino to fix Apple's implementation.
Quartz still generates a half-a** PDF.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, because in 2023 the pinnacle of computing, the standard by which all other lesser OSes are judged is......printing stuff out? I know I for sure have cursed the lack of display postscript every time my airport boarding pass comes out slightly different than the web page. Not that I'll be showing it to everyone, I have a phone for that of course, or could just use a kiosk, but even backups deserve crisp margins!
Adobe Reader? (Score:1, Troll)
Under his tenure
Was Adobe Reader also produced under his tenure? The single biggest security hole desktop computing has ever seen? That was the one and only way I ever had a machine infected. Visited a website which triggered a PDF download (which at the time would automatically launch Adobe Reader), and when I saw the Adobe splash screen briefly pop up and disappear and no document displayed I knew then I was in trouble.
Re:Adobe Reader? (Score:4, Insightful)
Was Adobe Reader also produced under his tenure? The single biggest security hole desktop computing has ever seen?
I would disagree as Adobe Flash was the biggest security hole to me. The only reason Reader could surpass it is that Flash was discontinued.
Re: (Score:2)
Kind of sad, Adobe was a great company with good ideas - early on. Later it got too bloated, to heavy to ever leave its own bed and it relied on gullible customers to give it sponge baths.
A word to brilliant people out there: be prepared to see your work tarnished and debased over time.
Goodbye and thank you (Score:5, Funny)
Allow me to express our deepest sorrow of hearing these news, on behalf of the anti-malware companies and IT security personnel community.
You and your products single-handedly kept us in employ for years.
He was 41 in 1982 (Score:4, Interesting)
It's nice to think that he founded such a massively successful startup when he was 41. These day's that's basically over the hill for a tech startup.
Also, when I first got into using Adobe software after coming from EDA packages (e.g. protel, powerPCB) I was shocked at how reasonable their pricing was. You couldn't even get quotations on pricing for engineering packages without basically doing an interview with the distributor. But Adobe you could just buy outright for a pretty decent price. And on top of that the software was great - indesign is incredibly intuitive, photoshop is complicated but once you understand how it works, unbelievably powerful.
I don't know what happened with flash though. That never worked properly at all.
Re: (Score:2)
And on top of that the software was great - indesign is incredibly intuitive, photoshop is complicated but once you understand how it works, unbelievably powerful.
Adobe didn't create Photoshop, they bought it. And while they did create InDesign, its behavior and interface were 100% based on/copied from Aldus Pagemaker, which Adobe acquired (with Aldus) in 1994.
Re: (Score:2)
I fondly recall Aldus Freehand. Then the scourge of Adobe happened to it.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not really true about InDesign being a carbon copy of PageMaker. InDesign is a lot more like QuarkXPress and Illustrator got caught in a Star Trek-style transporter accident where their DNA was merged and a single entity materialized on the transporter pad. InDesign was specifically engineered to compete with Quark - since they were discontinuing PageMaker - so it had to be somewhat approachable for Quark users.
Re: He was 41 in 1982 (Score:1)
I've used all of the programs we're talking about here to do paying work, and I can tell you from personal experience that InDesign is WAY more like pagemaker than it is like quark.
Dmitry Sklyarov (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the guy who had Dmitry Sklyarov imprisoned to protect Adobe's profits at risk from its shitty DRM implementation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org].
His stack-based forth-ish layout model is useful but it is greatly overshadowed by his corrupt assault on American Civil Liberties.
No, we didn't forget.
The idea that nobody would have invented a print-accurate layout languge if not for him is folly.
And without the threats against ghostscript, brscript, etc. we'd probably be further along by now.
I'll let somebody else talk about his push from the Board to move software to a subscription model.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not qualified to comment on the rest of the post, however
The idea that nobody would have invented a print-accurate layout languge if not for him is folly.
is true for virtually any invention or innovation ever.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not qualified to comment on the rest of the post, however
The idea that nobody would have invented a print-accurate layout languge if not for him is folly.
is true for virtually any invention or innovation ever.
Correct, which makes attribution pretty much a LOL event for most "inventions". We Humans iterate more than innovate. He did neither.
What's Postscript? (Score:2, Interesting)
I dealt with Adobe about 15 years ago writing direct to Postscript drivers (large format "plotters"). Nobody left at the company had any idea how Postscript actually worked, it was horrible. How they haven't gone bankrupt is quite a feat.
Postscript was great. Then... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Just because Adobe has moved on from Postscript doesn't mean it still isn't great. :)
Just for the record (Score:5, Informative)
Adobe did not create Photoshop - the Knoll brothers did. Adobe just bought it from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Postscript (Score:3)
I can't imagine grabbing someone and saying "Let's build our own printing language." I'd like to know how they got it adopted by everyone though.
Re:Postscript (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Postscript (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to know how they got it adopted by everyone though.
Two words. Apple LaserWriter
Re:Postscript (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone adopted it because it did everything anyone at the time needed it to do, and it Just Worked.
Pre-Windows, printer drivers were a NIGHTMARE. Especially if you had a non-Mac/non-PC, like an Amiga, Atari ST, etc.
99% of the reason WordPerfect achieved its early market dominance was PRECISELY the fact that it directly supported almost every printer capable of being connected to your computer. Moving back a generation to the c64, you basically had to buy a translating interface like the Cardco Card?+G (the name was a pun... in Commodore Basic, "?" tokenized to the "print" command, so it was pronouncd "CardPrintPlusG") that allowed software to pretend it was a commodore printer, but translated it to work with something like a Star Gemini 10X (personal, first-hand knowledge). The catch THEN was, the first-gen interfaces didn't have enough RAM to buffer an entire line of graphics, so it stupidly printed the line one literal column of dots at a time & had to keep backing up. It took hours, often an entire day of beating up your printer, to print a single page for a program like "The Print Shop". A few months later, they released an updated version (GeeWhiz, I think) that DID have enough RAM to buffer an entire line at a time.
Anyway, I digress. Back around 1988, if you had an Amiga and wanted to do DTP with scalable fonts, you had basically one choice: Postscript, via Apple Laserwriter. HP PCL2 support finally arrived sometime around 1991 or 1992 & enabled things like the Okidata LED printers to work, but well into the mid-90s, PostScript was what you wanted your printer to support if cost was even remotely not the dominant concern, because it basically eliminated printer headaches and Just Worked, regardless of what software you were running.
Windows 3.1 with Adobe Type Manager narrowed the gap, but it really wasn't until Windows 95 that PCL and Postscript could almost operate on equal terms. Then, GDI-based WinPrinters came out, and everything went to hell again for a few years (mostly, because at the time, neither Windows nor GDI WinPrinters had enough RAM to buffer the entire page, so they all did a brittle dance where Windows rendered the page to the hard drive, spooled *just* enough to fill the printer's ram buffer, triggered rasterization from the buffer to the drum, then had a mad race that had to be completed with clockwork precision to shovel the rest of the bitmap from the hard drive to the printer through a metaphorical cocktail straw where the whole page would be trashed if it couldn't finish in time. I *think* those printers actually had an alternate mode that reduced the drum rotation speed if there was more data to send once rasterization to the drum began than the interface could support.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Postscript (Score:4, Informative)
One important aspect of Postscript is that it was designed to be used on printing hardware with very limited resources (CPU, RAM). The first version of Postscript was designed to be consumed end-to-end: the CPU in the printer eats up the Postscript code one character at a time, never needing to refer to code that has been processed in the past, with each Postscript command modifying the state of the printer in some way (for example, telling it that the next drawing command should use 50% gray as its color). By design, there were no huge in-memory data structures, because there was literally nowhere to put them. Thus the language worked well on the rather limited hardware of the time.
Of course things changed, and as newer printers came along with faster CPUs and much more RAM, Postscript was modified to take advantage of these expanded resources. But for the first generation of laser printers, Postscript was an excellent choice.
The other key advantage of Postscript is that a properly-structured program could run on any Postscript device and produce identical output. This was an almost magical ability in a time when every print system had its own idiosyncratic way of doing things and getting identical output from any two devices was more a matter of chance than intent. If you go back to the really old days, you will see that many scientific papers of the time were distributed as Postscript (.ps) code; prior to PDF, Postscript was as close as we got to a universal distribution format (aside from an ASCII text file). All of the resources necessary to render the file were included in the PS file, such as fonts and images, making it portable and reliable.
PostScript was a game changer (Score:5, Informative)
I worked at one of the early laser printer companies in the late 80's, and they had good market share at the time. They had a printer 'language' which was really just a set of directives for things like which font to use and where/how to position the characters. One of my jobs was to write and maintain the printer driver that ran on the customer's Unix computers.
The driver would be invoked by the print spooler, and it would convert documents created by early word processors such as WordStar into a stream of directives that were sent to the printer over RS-232 serial cable or a parallel ribbon cable. No WiFi back in those days and ethernet was rare exotica. The printer was directly wired to one computer.
The character fonts were large files (basically bitmaps) that had to be sent to the printer, one for each font/point size. The printers had very limited memory, so if you used a variety of fonts they had to be swapped out of the printer and re-shipped down. That could take a lot of time and the print rate could slow to a crawl. If you wanted speed you would use one typeface and a handful of point sizes.
Everything was going okay but then Adobe came out with PostScript. It was incredible. No more font files, the language described the characters and how to manipulate them. It took more processing horsepower to interpret the language and image the resulting print, but the font flexibility alone more than made up for it. Disruptive!
Our company had no equivalent technology, PostScript was light years ahead. Sales dropped off and the company was eventually sold for a song.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe Postscript was antedated by other page description languages that were in use for example at Stanford. As far as I know, no one tried to commercialize them. This was potentiated by the laser printer, and not many places had one. Xerox had given Stanford the XGP (Xerox Graphics Printer).
Re: (Score:3)
That sounds very plausible. Back in that day there was no internet and information was a lot harder to come by. From the perspective of my employer, Postscript came fully formed out of nowhere but surely there were some predecessors.
Laser printers made it possible to put any kind of image on paper, but initially the machines were very expensive. Xerox and some Japanese companies made the print engines. You could buy them, make a board that could drive them, and sell it as a product for about $25k which was
Re: (Score:3)
Yep. Take a look at InterPress.
Postscript won out because it was a full-features programming language, with all the flexibility that implies.
Could Not Read The Obit (Score:3)