Someone I admire, too late obviously, because he made personal computers useful to the masses, not just the hobbyists, the diehards (my father) and what my main complaint was about them…they were a solution in search of a problem. Warnock co-founded Adobe, a software company that contributed to Jobs’ vision of making the personal computer the bike of the mind.
Despite some of the negative things regarding Adobe, namely how they just swallowed up competitors like everybody else, he and Geschke still led the company to making several instrumental must have pieces of software for Macs: Photoshop and Illustrator. Once they acquired Aldus, I’d say their place with graphic design became absolute. I’m bummed how some applications died out: Streamline, GoLive, Adobe Type Manager and Flash, they were cool. The first one gave me something to do when I was unemployed 30 years ago; it would convert a scanned image into a vectored file, making it easier to modify in Illustrator. Two others remain to compete, Premiere and InDesign. Adobe did a good job making the latter a fierce threat to QuarkXpress.
From what I read in a couple obits, Warnock’s main contribution was developing the PDF which remains a cross-platform standard. Numerous contracts are printed out and signed with them (I did with my mortgages and divorce) and LEGO utilizes it for sharing the lost instructions to sets they’ve designed for a couple decades.
Thanks Dr. Warnock! You and all the pioneers at Adobe made the Macintosh the leader for all of us who love to create! Whether it was my fake magazines as letters to friends, laying out my first Web page 25 years ago or creating those goofy “album” covers for my newer, ongoing, rejuvenated mixtape/podcast! Around 35 years ago, a poster for your first version of Photoshop I saw in the Johnston Hall lab proved, wow, you can do some TRON-level shit for a reasonable amount of dough. Sadly, Dean Murphy was too cheap to buy the Mac lab a licensed copy.