John Warnock – The Co-founder Adobe Systems Inc
John Warnock was an American computer scientist, inventor, and technology businessman best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke in 1982. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company. Although he retired as CEO in 2001, he continued to co-chair the Adobe Board of Directors with Geschke until 2017. Warnock pioneered the development of graphics, publishing, web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the field of publishing and visual communications.
Warnock’s earliest publication and subject of his master’s thesis, was his 1964 proof of a theorem solving the Jacobson radical for row-finite matrices, which was originally posed by the American mathematician Nathan Jacobson in 1956.
In his 1969 doctoral thesis, Warnock invented the Warnock algorithm for hidden surface determination in computer graphics. It works by recursive subdivision of a scene until areas are obtained that are trivial to compute. It solves the problem of rendering a complicated image by avoiding the problem. If the scene is simple enough to compute then it is rendered; otherwise it is divided into smaller parts and the process is repeated. Warnock noted that for this work he received “the dubious distinction of having written the shortest doctoral thesis in University of Utah history”. The Warnock algorithm solving the hidden surface problem enabled computers to render solid objects at a time when most computer renderings were only line drawings and was featured on the cover of Scientific American in 1970 with accompanying article by Ivan Sutherland.
In 1976, while Warnock worked at Evans & Sutherland, a Salt Lake City-based computer graphics company, the concepts of the PostScript language were seeded. Prior to co-founding Adobe with Geschke and Putman, Warnock worked with Geschke at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), where he had started in 1978. Unable to convince Xerox management of the approach to commercialize the InterPress graphics language for controlling printing, he, together with Geschke and Putman, left Xerox to start Adobe in 1982. At their new company, they developed from scratch an equivalent technology, PostScript, and brought it to market for Apple’s LaserWriter in 1985.
In late 1986, he had invented Adobe Illustrator, a computer drawing program which used lines and bézier curves to render images. He initially developed it to automate many of the manual tasks utilized by his wife, Marva, a graphics designer. It was released in early 1987.
In the spring of 1991, he outlined a system called “Camelot”, that evolved into the Portable Document Format (PDF) file-format. The goal of Camelot was to “effectively capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machines”. Warnock’s document contemplated:
Imagine if the IPS (Interchange PostScript) viewer is also equipped with text searching capabilities. In this case the user could find all documents that contain a certain word or phrase, and then view that word or phrase in context within the document. Entire libraries could be archived in electronic form. One of Adobe’s popular typefaces, Warnock, is named after him.
Adobe’s PostScript technology made it easier to print text and images from a computer, revolutionizing media and publishing in the 1980s.
In 2003, He and his wife donated 200,000 shares of Adobe Systems (valued at over $5.7 million) to the University of Utah as the main gift for a new engineering building. The John E. and Marva M. Warnock Engineering Building was completed in 2007 and houses the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the Dean of the University of Utah College of Engineering.
He held seven patents. In addition to Adobe Systems, he served or had served on the board of directors at ebrary, Knight-Ridder, MongoNet, Netscape Communications, and Salon Media Group. Warnock was a past chairman of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. He also served on the board of trustees of the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute.
Awards
Software Systems Award (1989, Association for Computing Machinery)
Edwin H. Land Medal (2000, Optical Society of America)
Bodley Medal (2003, Bodleian Library at Oxford University)
Lovelace Medal (2004, British Computer Society)
Medal of Achievement (2006, AeA)
Computer Entrepreneur Award (2008, IEEE Computer Society)
United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation (2009)
Marconi Prize (2010)
