Posted on 08/21/2023 6:06:32 PM PDT by nickcarraway
John Warnock, who invented the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, has died. He was 82.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and computer scientist died Saturday surrounded by family, Adobe said in a statement. The company didn't give a cause of death or say where Warnock died.“John’s brilliance and innovations left an indelible mark on Adobe, the technology industry and the world,” Adobe said.
Warnock worked for Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke created a company around a rejected idea in 1982. Nearly a decade later, Warnock outlined an early version of the Portable Document Format, or PDF, transforming the way documents are exchanged. Originally from the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay, Warnock described himself as an average student who later flourished in mathematics.
(Excerpt) Read more at ksbw.com ...
The difference is that PKZIP’s author died in squalor.
He may have been brilliant, and I hope he Rests in Peace, but I have NO IDEA WHAT PDF IS.
SORRY.
😂🤣
RIP.
I think he was living with his mom when he died. He also had a terrible substance abuse problem, if I remember correctly.
But the early days of the internet wouldn’t have been as productive without PK ZIP.
>> The difference is that PKZIP’s author died in squalor.
I did not know that. FWIW, the search engine dredged up an interesting commentary on Phil Katz (the “PK” in PKZIP) by someone who seems to have known him well...
http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
>> overall, the company just seems to suck
I have always found Adobe to be a toxic mixture of greedy and annoying. I used to HATE the way their adobe reader install would by default try to trick you into installing a bunch of other bloated crapware unless you paid attention and said no.
My first manager at IBM Research (J.C. King) was a friend of Charles Geschke when they were at CMU. Geschke and Warnock, of course, cofounded Adobe. Some years later, King left IBM and joined Adobe, becoming Senior Principal Scientist in charge of PDF (aka “PDF Architect”).
P.S. (pun intended) The PDF spec is now an ISO spec, no longer Adobe proprietary.
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