John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe and creator of Postscript and Illustrator, is dead at 82.
"It is with profound sadness that Adobe shares the passing of the company's beloved co-founder Dr. John Warnock," Adobe announced in a news release on Sunday. "Dr. Warnock passed away on Saturday surrounded by his family."
No cause of death was mentioned.
Warnock will be remembered for co-founding Photoshop-maker Adobe in 1982 with Charles Geschke. In a classic Silicon Valley tale, the two visionaries, who had first met while working at Xerox, reportedly started the company in the garage of Warnock's home in Los Altos. (As the story goes, the company's name came from the Adobe Creek that ran behind the house.) Before the year was out, they were fending off a takeover bid from Apple's Steve Jobs.
I'll be celebrating Warnock's work today by wiping my Photoshop prefs, then saving a JPG of a completely black page as a 48 megabyte PDF and sending it as an automatically-printing e-fax to the Power Macintosh G3 Mini Tower kept barely alive by the local newspaper since 1997 for Reasons no-one under 40 will ever comprehend.
