S03E61 From Algebra Failure to PDF Pioneer: The John Warnock Story
Ever wondered about the story behind PDFs that we use so effortlessly today? Prepare to be intrigued as we unravel the life of John Warnock, who defied all odds to become the co-founder of Adobe and pioneer the PDF. This episode is a tribute to the relentless spirit of this visionary who, after failing algebra in 9th grade, found his calling in the realm of computer science, thanks to an inspiring mentor.
His extraordinary journey led him to develop a program during his stint at Xerox, which revolutionized computer printing and laid the foundation of the PDF format. Through his inspiring tale, we reiterate the life-changing power of a great teacher, the joy of following one's passion, and the importance of turning a deaf ear to the naysayers.
Switching gears, our weekly thankful is the Krispy Kreme Original Glazed donut. This segment is a heartfelt appreciation of the culinary marvel that captivates taste buds across the globe.
Eager to know your thoughts on the transformative legacy of PDFs or your unforgettable Krispy Kreme experiences! Join us in this engaging conversation that blends technology with gastronomic pleasures.
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00:00:05 John Warnock
00:12:32 Appreciating the Original Glazed Donut
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S03E61 From Algebra Failure to PDF Pioneer: The John Warnock Story
[00:00:00] Sam Rhee: How does someone go from flunking ninth grade algebra to becoming inventor of the PDF, the worldwide version of electronic paper? While everyone has lives that we can learn from, some lives can resonate more than others in helping us lead our own. I saw a headline recently about the passing of John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Incorporated, the tech company.
I ended up reading the obituary, not because I knew anything about him or cared much about Adobe, but because the headline said that he was the inventor of the PDF. That got my interest because I wondered what kind of person would invent the PDF? Well, after reading the article about John Warnock, I was surprised and inspired. The amazing things that he accomplished in his lifetime have impacted everyone who uses a computer today reading about how he grew up, how he chose to live his life, and the career decisions he made inspired me and I hope inspire others as well.
My first personal experience with John Warnock's work was when I got to college.
If you're my age, you have memories of those noisy dot matrix printers back in the day before the nice, modern inkjet and laser printers of today. I remember in high school feeding papers with little holes on each side called tractor feed paper or fan fold paper where the sprockets of the printer would advance the paper as it printed.
Then you had to separate each sheet and tear off the perforated edges before turning in the paper to your teacher. It was John Warnock and Adobe that transformed computer printing. It wasn't until I got to college in 1988 when they had the first Apple LaserWriters that you could use at the computer lab.
I remember many nights waiting in line minutes before deadline, rushing to print my papers set at the largest font size and widest spacing I could get away with. My 10 page paper on existentialism may have been full of crap, but at least it looked crisp and clean, and that was courtesy of John Warnock's Handiwork
Warnock's work at his company, Adobe, has impacted anyone who's ever touched a computer. The PDF or portable document format he invented is the electronic version of a piece of paper. We all use PDF files nearly every day. It's ubiquitous. The records of my medical practice are all stored in PDF. I signed a legal document yesterday, which was sent to me via email on a PDF.
Today, we take it for granted that what we see on our computer screen can be printed exactly as visualized onto a sheet of paper and vice versa. But before John Warnock, this wasn't the case.
So the first lesson I got from reading about John Warnock is how influential an early mentor can be. John Warnock was the youngest of three children born October 6th, 1940, in a suburb of Salt Lake City.
His father was a lawyer and his mother was a homemaker. He was an average high school student who flunked to algebra in ninth grade. And then after bombing an aptitude test as a sophomore, Warnock was told that he probably should not consider going to college at all. When the guidance counselor asked him what he wanted to do in life, Warnock mentioned he was interested in engineering, and the counselor told him your probability of having any kind of success in any engineering related activity is probably zero.
So maybe a secondary lesson is that you shouldn't worry about the haters in life. And fortunately, Warnock had an influential high school teacher and mentor named George Barton. Barton would challenge his students with college level algebra and trigonometry questions, and Warnock said Barton was instrumental in getting all of his students to love mathematics.
And after working with him, he began to get straight A's in his classes, including math. This is a great example of the power of a teacher who can get students excited about learning and turn their lives around. In fact, John Warnock ended up going to University of Utah to major in mathematics and philosophy, and he even got a master's degree in math.
As a student he worked a number of manual labor jobs during the summers and one summer he worked at a really difficult job, retreading tires at an auto shop, which he said gave him a lot of incentive to find work that wasn't so backbreaking.
As a result of the painful lessons learned from tire retreading, he applied and got a job at IBM, which exposed him to computers and software, which was still in its very early stages in the 1960s.
After finding he really enjoyed this work he went back to school to get a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science in 1969, and then he started working for computer companies.
The second lesson I took away from John Warnock's life is that you should find what interests you and use that in your life to enrich your interests in work.
John Warnock had an abiding interest in visual aesthetics, which he translated over to his work in computer science. He was an artist creating charcoal drawings, watercolors, and landscape paintings. His doctoral thesis was actually the creation of a computer graphics algorithm, which helped programmers render solid objects onto screen back in the day when most digital renderings were just line drawings. This computer graphics algorithm known as the Warnock Algorithm for Hidden Surface Determination was actually featured on the cover of Scientific American in 1970.
John Warnock then worked at several different computer science companies after his doctorate but then he finally settled on working at Xerox in 1978 at their Palo Alto Research Center or PARC.
PARC was a now famous, innovative research center filled with young, bright engineers where many modern computer developments first were invented, including the ethernet network, the computer mouse, and the concept of a point and click graphical desktop interface.
He and a coworker, Charles Geschke, began working on a project that would allow printers to replicate exactly what was on the computer screen. Something again that seems obvious today, but was not possible at the time. Again, this project was driven by Warnock's interest in visual aesthetics being applied to computer graphics and printing. The product that they came up with together was called InterPress, which was the precursor to the printing computer language, PostScript, which eventually led to the development of the PDF format. However, Xerox decided not to develop their InterPress product for commercial use.
Which now leads to the third lesson I took away from John Warnock's life. Don't be afraid to take risks if you truly believe in your own success. Even though Xerox PARC was a fantastic and innovative workplace where there were many scientists developing some of the world's biggest technologies, Warnock decided to leave and follow his own path because he truly believed in the technology he was developing.
He went to Geschke, his co-creator's office and said, we can live in the world's greatest sandbox for the rest of our life, or we can do something about it. So they both quit and in 1982 together they founded Adobe Systems, named for a creek near John Warnock's home. At this time, Adobe currently has a market capitalization of $235 billion, making it one of the largest information technology companies in the world, and their company has been consistently ranked as one of the best tech places to work.
The fourth lesson from John Warnock's life is to find partners that you can truly trust. Both John Warnock and Charles Geschke ran Adobe as equals, which was unusual in Silicon Valley where big egos and one upmanship is much more common. Think Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates.
When Geschke was asked why he decided to leave Xerox with Warnock, he said, at Xerox I'm going to become old and gray doing really innovative and fun things, but they may never get out into the world, and then only I will know about them, and that's not what an engineer lives for.
After Warnock and Geschke started Adobe about a year later in 1983, Steve Jobs at Apple visited them and saw their InterPress product, which they now named Postscript. Steve Jobs offered to buy their company Adobe for $5 million, or about 15 million in today's dollars. They refused, but they agreed to license Postscript to Steve Jobs to Apple for their new printer, which was called the Apple LaserWriter.
The Apple LaserWriter, coupled with the Macintosh computer, was the first commercially available what you see is what you get system where users could compose documents on a Macintosh computer, design exactly what they envisioned and then print it out on the laser printer where they could replicate what they had created and have it appear on paper. Layout, fonts, graphics, all of it.
This PostScript technology, coupled with Apple's hardware spawned a new era of desktop publishing. That meant anyone could essentially run their own printing press, allowing anyone to publish their own magazines, journals, newspapers, any document, making Warnock and Geschke the technological descendants of Johannes Gutenberg, the German inventor of the printing press.
John Warnock also invented one of the first creative design applications, Adobe Illustrator, a computer drawing program that is still a staple for most graphics professionals. He first developed it for his wife Marva, who was a graphic designer and actually designed the Adobe logo.
After growing exponentially with Postscript and Adobe Illustrator, Adobe then continued its massive growth by releasing a number of nearly essential applications for creative professionals, familiar probably to most anyone using computers including Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Lightroom and InDesign amongst others.
It's hard to visualize what the creative world would be like without these applications. I use Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro for this podcast, and I can't imagine using anything else.
Charles Geschke, Warnock's longtime business partner, passed away two years ago at the age of 81 after serving various positions at Adobe as chief operating officer, president and co-chairman of the board.
Both Warnock and Geschke retired from Adobe in 2001, shortly after the other, and together they received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009, which is one of the nation's highest honors bestowed on scientists, engineers and inventors.
The last lesson I took away from John Warnock's life is that finding and pursuing a lifelong interest can not only be fulfilling for you, but it might just make a tremendous impact on the world
If the accomplishments I mentioned weren't enough to cement his legacy, in 1993, John Warnock and Adobe created PDF or the portable document format based on their PostScript printer language. Again, it was all based on Warnock's abiding interest in making sure that what was seen on a computer screen, words, images, layout, would look exactly the same on another computer.
If you ever remembered getting a Microsoft Word document from someone and printing it, but then realizing that your printed copy was slightly different from someone else's printed copy, maybe you didn't have the same fonts, your printer models were different. You would then realize how useful a PDF file could be.
At first when Adobe released PDF and its associated software, Adobe Acrobat, it wasn't immediately successful. In fact, the company board wanted to drop the products after a couple years, but John Warnock persisted. He went to IBM, the CDC, even the IRS, and John Warnock argued that the PDF could effectively capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machines.
30 years later, John Warnock's vision is now a reality and it was his belief in the product that eventually helped to drive widespread adoption of the PDF. PDF is now an open standard and the file format may be used royalty free by anyone.
And over 3 trillion PDF documents have been created at this time. There's no other alternative to PDF in the world, and Warnock's creation stands as the pinnacle of the electronic paper document.
When you truly believe in something, you must stick with it to your core, and you might just end up changing the world. Warnock said afterwards, we said to ourselves, this is the way the future's going to be. We're going to stick it out and to hell with the rest of the world.
John Warnock died on August 19th, 2023 at his home in Los Altos, California, of pancreatic cancer. He was 82 years old and he was survived by his wife, Marva and his three children.
My weekly thankful is something completely different than the tech industry. It is the Krispy Kreme donut. An appreciative patient brought them in as a gift today. Now I really don't want patients to bring in gifts, especially food gifts because I may not eat them but I haven't had a Krispy Kreme in over six months, maybe longer.
And so I had one, maybe two. Okay. Two donuts today, and it is as good as I remembered. The original glaze donuts is definitely the best, the right amount of sugar glaze with a perfect melt on the tongue, giving way to the soft, full donut texture. It really is a near perfect donut experience.
Again, so I don't eat Krispy Kremes that often, and it may be another six months or another week, who knows before I have another one. But you have to appreciate it when a company truly believes in their products, sticks with it, and truly makes something that is a culinary work of art. Thank you to Krispy Kreme.
Let me know your thoughts about PDFs, Krispy Kreme donuts, or anything else. DM me @BotoxAndBurpeesPodcast on Instagram. Or leave a comment at YouTube.com/@BotoxAndBurpees. Thank you.
