John Warnock, Co-Founder of Adobe and Creator of PDF, Passes Away

John Warnock, the creator of the PDF format and co-founder of Adobe, has passed away at the age of 82. The news was reported by the software company’s press service. The American scientist died on Saturday, August 19.

Warnock co-founded Adobe Systems in 1982 with Charles Geschke, after the two entrepreneurs had worked together at Xerox. The company's first product was the PostScript page description language, which revolutionized the publishing industry and is still used today for printing text documents and images.

Warnock also developed Adobe Illustrator and the Portable Document Format (PDF), a format he began working on in 1991. Initially, the format was not widely known, but over the years, it evolved to become one of the most widely used formats in the world.

Throughout his career, Warnock received several awards for his contributions to science and technology, including the ACM Software Systems Award in 1989, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009, and the 2010 Marconi Prize for computing and communications science.