October 6, 1940 – August 19, 2023
Co-founder of Adobe (former CEO and Co-Chairman of the Board), B.S. in Mathematics & Philosophy, PhD in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science) from the University of Utah; Inventor, Visionary, Philanthropist.
Dr. John Edward Warnock, affectionately known to his family and closest friends as “Bill”, passed away Saturday, August 19, at age 82, after a nearly two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Widely recognized as one of America’s greatest technology inventors, Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Dr. Charles “Chuck” Geschke. Warnock received multiple awards for his inventions in the U.S. and abroad, including the prestigious National Medal of Technology and Innovation presented by President Barack Obama in 2008, the Marconi Society Prize in 2010, Oxford University’s Bodleian Medal in 2003, and the IEEE Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2008, to name just a few. Warnock joined Geschke at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1978 and together they developed Interpress, a page description language that could enable laser printers to process text and images from newly emerging personal computers. When their vision to develop Interpress to work in a device-independent manner was rejected by Xerox, they left and founded Adobe and invented Postscript, which launched the revolution in desktop publishing. Postscript is based on an interpretive programming language that Warnock had championed over the years. By late 1986, Warnock had also invented Adobe Illustrator, the application which uses bézier curves to render infinitely scalable graphics. He was inspired by his wife, Marva, to automate many of the manual tasks she utilized as a graphic designer. In the spring of 1991, Warnock outlined a system called “Camelot”, that evolved into the Portable Document Format (PDF) file-format. The goal was to “effectively capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machine” and to equip it with text searching capabilities. In 2021 it was estimated that 2.5 trillion documents were in the PDF format.
Warnock grew up in Holladay, Utah, southeast of Salt Lake City. Warnock graduated from the University of Utah with a B.S. in mathematics and philosophy. For his Master’s thesis, he solved a previously unsolved mathematical problem in ring theory, and earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science). He also solved what is now known as the “Warnock Algorithm”, enabling computers to render solid and interlocking objects at a time when most computer renderings could only produce simple line drawings. A computer-generated illustration based on this work was featured on the cover of Scientific American in 1970.
Warnock set a high standard for Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and leaders. He was a humble, modest, and generous person and is known to have said that “great ideas come from everywhere in the company”. Warnock and his wife Marva endowed a Chair in Medicine at Stanford University and a Computer Science, Mathematics and Fine Arts Chair at the University of Utah, including a cornerstone grant, establishing the John and Marva Warnock Engineering Building at the University of Utah in 2007. The couple also endowed a chair at the Moran Eye Center in Ophthalmology, which supports the Global Outreach Division’s work to treat preventable blindness in Utah and around the world. John was extraordinarily multidimensional. He was an avid skier, gifted painter, and art and rare book collector. He was also the Founding Chairman of the Tech Museum of Innovation from 1995 to 1999.
Amongst his numerous achievements, Dr. Warnock was above all a loving husband and father. He is survived by his wife Marva, and their three children, Christopher (Barbara), Jeffrey, and Alyssa (Todd), and four grandchildren, John-Alex, Joshua, Kaia and Gunnar. In the words of Adobe Systems’ current CEO, Shantanu Narayen, “John’s brilliance and technology innovations changed the world. It is a sad day for the Adobe community and the industry for which he has been an inspiration for decades.”
A celebration of life will be held on September 17, at 2:30 pm for family and friends at Adobe.