The Life of John Warnock

About John E. Warnock

John Edward Warnock is best known for
co-founding Adobe Systems inc. with Chuch Gheschke, which
revolutionized the digital printing, publishing, and graphics
industries shortly before the start of the twenty-first century.

Early life and education

John Warnock was born in 1940, in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was an average student throughout his early academic years until a teacher in highschool was able to spark in interest for mathematics. Warnock graduated high school with his newfound interest in mathematics and began attending the University of Utah, where he received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Philosophy in 1961, and his master’s in mathematics in 1964. John warnock was dubbed for having the shortest doctoral thesis in 1969, when he invented the Warnock algorithm for hidden surface determination in computer graphics

Early work and innovations

During his doctoral studies, Warnock also began working with ARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, on part of a government-funded contract granted to Evans & Sutherland, a University-based start-up that was founded in 1968 by two leading professors in the U’s Computer Science Department, David Evans BA’49 PhD’53 and Ivan Sutherland. Most of the company’s staff members were current or former students. ARPA was designed to promote technological breakthroughs and big-picture thinking (initially to counteract work done by the Soviets) using small research teams. At Evans & Sutherland, Warnock first began to work on ideas for a computer language that would allow computers and printers to talk to each other.

Warnock left Evans & Sutherland in the late 1970s and became a principal scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), in California. The center was doing some of the more cutting-edge computer graphics research at the time, and Warnock worked on interactive computer graphics projects that would shape the way computers would evolve over the next three decades. “Essentially, Xerox really invented the personal computer the way we know it today, with the use of graphical user interface, and the use of type and laser printers,” Warnock says.

At Xerox, one of Warnock’s colleagues was Geschke, head of PARC’s Imaging Sciences Laboratory. The pair were like-minded idealists and innovators, intent on solving some of the thorniest problems in computer graphics. They had a particular interest in tackling a solution to computer-generated typefaces and images. At the time, it was virtually impossible for a computer to render a smooth, aesthetically pleasing typeface or picture, let alone send the image to a printer. The two scientists eventually developed InterPress, a printing protocol that allowed computers and printers to communicate.

But Xerox balked at Warnock and Geschke’s brainchild. The duo tried to convince Xerox executives that the system they had developed would be the wave of the future. Xerox wanted to make it a proprietary form, while Warnock and Geschke believed that InterPress would be better put to use in the marketplace, where it could become standard on its own. After two years of lobbying by the scientists, Xerox preferred to just sit on the idea. “They decided that they weren’t going to adopt what we had worked on, [and] they weren’t going to let the world know about it,” he says. “We thought that was crazy.” Warnock and Geschke decided to make a go of it on their own, and they left to found Adobe Systems in 1982.