John Warnock, Who Invented the PDF and Co-Founded Adobe Systems, Dies at Age 82

KSBW ^ | Aug 21, 2023

[PallMal]

The difference is that PKZIP’s author died in squalor.

[Maris Crane]

He may have been brilliant, and I hope he Rests in Peace, but I have NO IDEA WHAT PDF IS.

SORRY.

[SaveFerris]

😂🤣

[fieldmarshaldj]

RIP.

[DoodleBob]

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.

[Nervous Tick]

>> 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

[Nervous Tick]

>> 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.

[powerset]

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.