John Warnock, one of the co-founders of Adobe, dies at the age of 82

Adobe co-founder John Warnock died on Saturday, August 19, 2023, at the age of 82, the company said in a statement, cited by Reuters. The cause of his death has not been disclosed.

“This is a sad day for the Adobe community and the industry for which it has been a source of inspiration for decades,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in an email sent to employees.

John Warnock, along with Charles Geschke, founded Adobe in 1982 in Warnock’s garage.

Back in 1976, while working at Evans & Sutherland, a computer graphics company, John Warnock came up with the idea of creating the PostScript programming language. Since 1978, Warnock has worked with Geschke at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), from which Steve Jobs stole the idea of modern operating system UI. Due to a disagreement with Xerox’s management on the future development of the technology, Warnock, along with Geschke and Putman, left Xerox to found Adobe in 1982. At the new company, they developed PostScript technology, which revolutionized the publishing industry in the 1980s. In 1991, Warnock began work on the Camelot system, which later became known as the Portable Document Format.

In 2000, John Warnock retired as CEO. Until 2017, he and Charles Geschke served as chairman of the board of Adobe. Charles Geschke died in April 2021 at the age of 81.