John Warnock, a Utah native who co-founded Adobe, died Saturday at the age of 82.
“John’s brilliance and technology innovations changed the world,” Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote in an email to employees. “It is a sad day for the Adobe community and the industry for which he has been an inspiration for decades. … John has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest inventors in our generation with significant impact on how we communicate in words, images and videos.”
IN 1982, Warnock co-founded Adobe with Charles Geschke after the two met while working at Xerox. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, “groundbreaking technology that sparked the desktop publishing revolution,” according to Adobe. Under his leadership, Adobe launched the PDF file format and Acrobat, Photoshop and Premiere Pro.
One of Adobe’s typefaces, Warnock, is named after him.
Warnock retired as CEO in 2000 and was co-chairman of the board, with Geschke, until 2017. He remained a member of the company’s board of directors until his death.
Born in Salt Lake City and raised in Holladay, Warnock graduated from Olympus High — where he failed math as a ninth grader, he said in an interview with the U.’s Continuum magazine.
(Screengrab via the University of Utah) Keynote speaker John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Inc., appears during the University of Utah's virtual commencement ceremony, which took place Thursday, April 30, 2020. The event occurred entirely online due the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
He graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy, and later received a master’s degree in mathematics and a doctorate in electrical engineering/computer science from the U.
Warnock and his wife, Marva, operated the Blue Boar Inn & Restaurant in Midway. The John E. & Marva M. Warnock Engineering Building at the University of Utah, which opened in 2007, was named after them.
