I’m sad beyond words to report the passing of Dr John Warnock at the age on 82. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1982 and invented PostScript, PDF and other publishing technology. Chuck passed away two years ago.
I cannot adequately express the feelings of sadness and gratitude in the Adobe Community for these wonderful men. They were lovely human beings, great engineers, incredible innovators and very successful business leaders. To Adobe Engineers, John and Chuck were much more than the boss. They inspired everybody who had the privilege to work with them.
Today, we take beautiful and inexpensive print, scaleable text and PDF for granted. These technologies changed the world. Few leave such a legacy. Thank You, John and Chuck.
Wow, that name brings back some memories. At university in the mid 1970s, I and another student did a project in a computer graphics course using the Warnock algorithm (from Dr. Warnock’s doctoral thesis) for hidden line removal, coupled with some animation of a cube. We had to do the work with punched cards and a plotter on an IBM mainframe. I swear the lights dimmed when we ran test jobs, and the job would time out after drawing about 5 cubes. We may have made a bit of progress since then…
@elGordo Ah, yes. I remember Warnock’s Algorithm in which he used recursion to divide and conquer the 3-D space. I discovered this while working in Computer Aided Design in the 1980s.
It was the CAD system that brought me to plotting on PostScript laser printers. I took the PostScript Language Reference Manual (the Red Book) home from the office and read it in a single session. When I finished about 6am in the morning, I thought “This is beautiful. I want to work with the people who thought of this.”
You’re right, we’ve come a long way since the 70s with comprehensive libraries such as OpenGL.
The following obituary appeared in The Times (of London) on 5 September 2023. I added a page to my website with photos and stories: https://clanmills.com/2023/JohnWarnock/
