Remembering John Warnock, Co-Creator of PostScript and Acrobat

pcmag.com:

I was saddened to hear about the passing of Adobe founder John Warnock this weekend. John was one of the pioneers of the modern computer industry and was largely responsible for making computer documents look as good as the best documents from a traditional printing press.

I first met John in late 1984, when Steve Jobs showed me the LaserWriter, Apple's first laser printer. He was particularly proud of the quality of the fonts it could produce, and he introduced me to John and his partner Chuck Geschke, who had created the PostScript language. This is "God's own Helvetica!," Jobs told me.

Remember at this point, most people were printing from their PCs using either dot-matrix printers, which had a very limited number of typefaces, most looking horrible; or from devices that looked like typewriters, and could produce just a single font at a time.

Canon had created the LBP-CX, a desktop laser printer engine, in 1983; and HP introduced the first desktop laser printer, the first LaserJet in the spring of 1984. Apple wanted to do something better, and particularly wanted a printer that could match the fonts in its Lisa and Macintosh computers.

Warnock had been working on computer typography since the mid 1970s, first at Evans & Sutherland, and then at Xerox PARC. Unable to convince Xerox to commercialize a solution called InterPress, he and Geschke started Adobe Systems in December 1982. There they created a simpler version called PostScript. Jobs saw the software and licensed it for the LaserWriter, which was announced in January, 1985. Read PCMag's first guide to PostScript from April 1991.

The rest of the decade saw a revolution in what we called "desktop publishing," spurred on by the introduction of Aldus PageMaker