Farewell to John Warnock, an internet pioneer and co-inventor of the PDF whose invention actually made the world better
Farewell to John Warnock, an internet pioneer and co-inventor of the PDF whose invention actually made the world better
In June 1969, John E. Warnock achieved a milestone of sorts at the University of Utah by producing the shortest Ph.D. dissertation in the university's history.
Warnock, who died Saturday, was one of the leading computer scientists of his era and co-founder in 1982 of Adobe Inc.
Adobe is… kind of evil? He made the world a better place? Maybe at first.
The amount of creativity Adobe products unleashed upon the world is staggering. Decades ago they were groundbreaking. Just about any piece of media you have ever seen from the past 35+ years has been touched by them in some way.
The Adobe we know now was not the Adobe of back then. Just like the Apple of 1985 is not anything like the Apple we have today. Back then it was about actually developing useful technology, and not just coming up with innovative ways to squeeze every last dollar from every possible customer for the same bloated and tired piece of software.
Back then you had a problem (eg. people wanted to create artistic stuff), and then you had a solution (powerful software to help you). Now software like that is everywhere, so the only way for companies to "compete" is by adding bloat and jacking up the price. Hence the Adobe we see today, full of pointless crap and complex licensing schemes.
the only way for companies to "compete" is by adding bloat and jacking up the price
I'll disagree.
Adobe products only "seem" like they're full of bloat, but they're actually not: what they have, and makes them competitive, is tools for niche cases. These tools are useless for 99% of the users, even for those where an Adobe product does have a tool for their particular niche case... but otherwise, it wouldn't be there.
When free alternatives have 99% of the most commonly used tools, the only remaining way to compete is to gather the remaining 1% and mash them together... along with the 99% of tools that are now a "have them or die".
Whether you want to pay Adobe's prices just to get the few tools that fit your niche... well, sometimes you have no alternative, or the alternative is even more niche and way more expensive.
I’d agree with this, thanks for chiming in!
A vehemently disagree with any statement that claims PDF made the world better.
OK, I can be a little more nuanced, the many ways PDFs are used today, for anything but printing something, are making the world a worse place.
PDFs replaced most .doc... that, made the world... "much less worse"? 😐
I agree on what you say about the ways PDFs are used today, but back in the 1982 the world was different. Back then it was a useful thing imho.
PDFs are a pain in the fucking ass.