10 ms·

John Warnock has died

590 points by skilled 3y ago

glimshe 3y ago
Say what you want from Adobe's rent-seeking practices, but it's a company that created some of the first, most important real-world applications for personal computers. With Postscript and Photoshop, Adobe revolutionized, if not created, new industries.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > most important real-world applications for personal computers. Applications are one thing (e.g. the way they took away Quark's iron-handed grasp on DTP). But, then there are the standards. For example, PDF. The modern world would barely operate without PDF.
  - codethief 3y ago
    > The modern world would barely operate without PDF. Maybe. But maybe people would have simply adopted other standards, like djvu.
    - j1elo 3y ago
      It wouldn't be the same. It would be much more confusing. - Thank you for the meeting, oh and please send me the djvu of your reports - Oh I'd swear we already had this conversation and I had already sent them?
      - cogman10 3y ago
        I'm guessing we'd shorten the name to just vu. djvu is a mouthful.
    - traceroute66 3y ago
      > Maybe. But maybe people would have simply adopted other standards, like djvu. Some people still insist on using non-PDF, for example the Swiss tax office insists on some weird proprietary format[1], QDF made by some obscure company called Snapform. All their forms are in QDF format. It introduces completely un-necessary friction into the process. Everyone knows they should have just used PDF. Instead of forcing people to install some reader software they will never use for any other purpose. [1] https://www.estv.admin.ch/estv/en/home/anticipatory-tax/claim-refund/domicil-abroad.html https://www.estv.admin.ch/estv/en/home/anticipatory-tax/clai...
  - postmodest 3y ago
    We'd all be using TeX, right?
    - ruuda 3y ago
      How would we exchange, print, and view rendered documents? DVI perhaps, but it's not completely self-contained.
  - layer8 3y ago
    HTML might have become a document interchange format, and we’d be less stuck to fixed page-based layouts as with PDF now.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      Apples and oranges, my friend.
      - layer8 3y ago
        That’s exactly my point though. We might be using oranges instead of apples now if history had been different.
        weebull 3y ago
        We use both for different things. They don't solve the same problem.
        hasmanean 3y ago
        In a different universe we would have been happy with the limitations of html and published everything with a minimal of markup.
        layer8 3y ago
        For most documents that are published as PDF nowadays, there is only little practical use for them to have a predetermined pagination and layout, and a free-flowing layout would be perfectly fine. If PDF didn’t exist, those documents might instead be typically published in a format more akin to EPUB or MOBI.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    This grasp of history isn't quite right. Adobe PostScript, invented by Warnock, was _the_ standard. It was the means by which an application could describe to the computer in the printer the layout of the page. (And later the compute resources in the printer got separated first into Raster Image Processors (RIPs) and later just part of printer drivers in the computers). The development of PDF was driven by the need to resolve incompatibilities in PostScript implementations that had become the nightmare of graphics pros in the early 90s. It was not uncommon to have to use random software to convert one PS file to another PS file which could be understood by the RIP owned by a given print shop. Quark was built on the infrastructure enabled by PostScript in the first place. Edit to add: possible confusion - RIPs were primarily used to generate super high res output on film used for lithographic plates, but they were enabled by the standardization around PostScript for driving laser printers.
    - wbl 3y ago
      Unfortunately today my printer cannot print PDFs with ligatures correctly.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    >>The modern world would barely operate without PDF. PDF was great when most documents needed to be printed, so sending say an invoice to someone you could ensure their printed copy was the same as your printed copy. PDF in "modern" world, where printing is less important and really should be sent to the dust bin if history. PDF has become a complex web of security problems, screen compatibility problems, and various other things including the complex web of converters to take PDF's and make them back into something editable / usable. We need a replacement for PDF, and let PDF go away along with the printer
    - em3rgent0rdr 3y ago
      I get what you are saying. But in a world where most websites looks different on every different browser and browser size and with constantly-changing content, it can be refreshing to have a PDF that whose context is fixed and you know is going to be laid out the same anywhere.
      - jonny_eh 3y ago
        It certainly has its niches, but most people are viewing documents on their phones these days, and PDFs and phones don't work great together.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >PDF in "modern" world, where printing is less important and really should be sent to the dust bin if history. If you do any kind of business at all, especially the accounting side of things, printing is still a hard requirement and PDF makes all that practical.
      - phpisthebest 3y ago
        >>especially the accounting side of things, printing is still a hard requirement That is provably false, lots of businesses have gone paperless, and all (at least for the US) government agencies, courts, etc all fully accept erecords, many preferring it.
    - 3y ago
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Don’t forget Flash.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    Wasn't that Macromedia, and acquired by Adobe?
  - binarymax 3y ago
    Flash was developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe well into its maturity.
    - random3 3y ago
      Photoshop was acquired too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Adobe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Adobe not sure if this is relevant though.
      - richardwhiuk 3y ago
        Prior to it becoming seriously popular though, I think?
        rmason 3y ago
        At the time it was purchased the company was primarily two brothers from Ann Arbor. Might have had one or two employees.
        hamburglar 3y ago
        Flash was already quite popular when Adobe acquired Macromedia. I knew of at least one "Flash competitor" project that fizzled out internally before they decided to buy.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- gumby 3y ago
  Thank you for that. I liked and admired Warnock, and hate Adobe. But your framing put it in a proper context. But from the day it was announced I have always thought postscript is completely backwards.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    Not to be too forward, but PostScript is supposed to be completely backwards. It's not bad, it's just drawn that way. The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989: https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-october-1989-19e2dfa4d91e https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...
    - paradox460 3y ago
      I often wish we'd have the computing future you guys envisioned. Your work on pie menus alone is incredible, and the demo of NeWS is still mind blowing all these years later
    - gumby 3y ago
      Very funny, Don, but I mean focusing on the rigid constraints of paper rather than the fluid screen environment is to focus on early 20th century technical constraints rather than the future. This when receiving a link to a pdf on your phone the natural action is to ignore it and do something else.
      - DonHopkins 3y ago
        Seriously, I think PostScript's predecessor Interpress and its successor PDF were more focused on "the rigid constraints of paper" and printed page and document structures than PostScript was. With NeWS, instead of paper, we drew on overlapping arbitrarily shaped nested scaled clipped canvases, and never used the "showpage" operator or DSC (Document Structuring Conventions) or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) comments when using PostScript to draw trees of user interfaces components (like Open Look and PSIBER) and interactive zooming applications and visualizations (like the drawing editor in HyperLook, and the zooming scrolling animated SimCity maps and sprite overlays and graphs). PDF is more constrained and document/page structure focused that free form PostScript even with DSC/EPS, as were Interpress and JaM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Structuring_Conventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Structuring_Conventio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript I always thought it was a bold move to name a page description language for laser printers "JaM" (the predecessor to Interpress). Brian Reid touched on (or rather dove deep into) it when he described the different approaches JaM and Interpress and PostScript had to structure and semantics. The whole article is fascinating, but I'll quote the relevant parts: https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html >From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> >Posted: Fri Mar 1 19:08:05 1985 >Subject: PostScript and Interpress: a comparison [...] >There is, however, a crucial difference between the PostScript and Interpress naming schemes that makes them very different, and makes impossible the above-mentioned imagined compiler to translate PostScript into Interpress. That difference is best understood as a semantic difference, and will be explained in the next section. >Returning to syntactic issues, an Interpress file has what is called "static structure" or "lexical structure". This means that you can look at an Interpress file and make structural assumptions about what you find there. For example, an Interpress file is defined to be a sequence of "bodies"; each body is a sequence of operators and operands. The first body is the "preamble", or setup code; all following bodies correspond to printed pages. If an Interpress file has 11 bodies, then it will print as 10 pages. >By contrast, a PostScript file has no fixed lexical structure; it is just a stream of tokens to be processed by the interpreter. PostScript prints a page whenever the SHOWPAGE operator is executed. If a PostScript file contains a loop from 1 to 10, with a SHOWPAGE operator inside the loop, then it will print 10 pages even though there is only one actual call to SHOWPAGE in the file. However, since PostScript is a textual language, and since it has a "comment" facility like the C /..../ or Pascal {...}, it is possible for the creator of a PostScript file to represent whatever additional information is desired. It is a slight misnomer to call this a comment facility, because the normal use of the word "comment" in programming languages implies that the contents of the comment are irrelevant. PostScript comments are irrelevant in the sense that they do not affect the image produced by a PostScript file, but they do convey machine-readable information about the structure of the document. >A PostScript client is free to choose any structuring scheme that he wants, and the tool that he has available to implement this structuring scheme is the PostScript comment. There is a particular "standard" structuring convention documented along with PostScript by which page boundaries and other lexical information can be marked. A PostScript file that follows that convention is called a "conforming" file, but it is a convention and not a rule; the printed image produced by a nonconforming PostScript file will be identical to that produced by the equivalent conforming PostScript file. Conversely, the structure of a PostScript file, as represented by the structuring convention, is completely independent of the appearance of the page images--the actual PostScript text appears to be a series of comments as far as the structuring systems are concerned. >The technique of mixing two different languages in one file, so that a processor for one language sees the text of the other language as comments, is not new. Perhaps the most widely-known instance of this scheme is Don Knuth's "WEB" system, in which Pascal and TEX are woven together in such a way that the Pascal program looks like a comment to the TEX interpreter and the TEX source looks like a comment to the Pascal compiler. >This absence of fixed lexical structure in PostScript is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it offers more flexibility in creating page images, especially repetitive ones; on the other hand, it provides more opportunities to make mistakes. [...] >An Interpress file consists of a series of bodies. Each body is executed completely independently of each other body. In particular, at the beginning of each page body, the execution environment is restored to the state that it had at the end of execution of the preamble, so that each page body is executed as if it were the only page in the document. There is absolutely nothing that the code in one Interpress page can do that will have any effect on the execution of the code in any other Interpress page, and the Interpress language guarantees that independence. This permits, for example, the pages to be executed or printed in any order, front to back or back to front, or in folios of 16 pages at a time, with complete confidence that the appearance of the pages will not change. >By contrast, a PostScript file has no static structure, so there is no convenient place to build automatic firewalls. PostScript provides, instead, two pairs of operators by which a PostScript user can build his own firewalls wherever he wants them. There is an operator called SAVE, and another operator called RESTORE. The RESTORE operator restores the execution state of the machine back to what it was when the last SAVE operator was executed. Thus, if a PostScript user wants to have pages that are firewalled against each other, then he puts a SAVE operator at the beginning of the page and a RESTORE operator at the end of the page. If the PostScript user wants to play tricks, and build PostScript files that do bizarre things with the execution state between pages, he is free to do so by leaving out the SAVE and RESTORE. >By now you can probably see the fundamental philosophical difference between PostScript and Interpress. Interpress takes the stance that the language system must guarantee certain useful properties, while PostScript takes the stance that the language system must provide the user with the means to achieve those properties if he wants them. With very few exceptions, both languages provide the same facilities, but in Interpress the protection mechanisms are mandatory and in PostScript they are optional. Debates over the relative merits of mandatory and optional protection systems have raged for years not only in the programming language community but also among owners of motorcycle helmets. While the Interpress language mandates a particular organization, the PostScript language provides the tools (structuring conventions and SAVE/RESTORE) to duplicate that organization exactly, with all of the attendant benefits. However, the PostScript user need not employ those tools. >Before taking a stand on this issue, you must remember that neither Interpress nor PostScript is engineered to be a general-purpose programming language, but rather to be a scheme for the description of page images, so it is not necessarily valid to apply programming language lore to these two systems. [...]
- sokoloff 3y ago
  > Adobe's rent-seeking practices What are these? Adobe provides a large amount of value to the graphics industry and charges a fee for that. People buy it if they want or don't if they don't. I fail to see any rent seeking (seeking to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth to the society).
rvz 3y ago
RIP Warnock. Black bar for this legend please.
- apples_oranges 3y ago
  Off topic but so many heroes of tech (so to speak) are old now perhaps it’s time to retire the black bar
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    hard to say, demographics are regular and we will always have waves of pioneers dying .. I don't know
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      If you place the dawn of the computer era (in terms of more than, say, 1000 people working in the field) sometime in the 1950s, and the youngest of those people were 20 when they began, we are now reaching the point where even the oldest of those people are dead or about to die. Broad demographics are regular, but we're sliding into the period where "the first 10,000 people to make a living from working with computer technology" are all going to be dead or about to die. That's a sort of unique inflection point. If you also reflect on the fact that a lot of the computer technologies that impact people the most today were developed in the 1970s-1990s period, this becomes even more so.
      - agumonkey 3y ago
        I understand that these were inflection points, but I was assuming that there would be others on new fields. Maybe less virginial than first processors / OSes / editors / photo editing etc but still pionneers on their domain.
  - chongli 3y ago
    The black bar is a simple gesture of respect. The fact that we’ve been losing a lot of important tech people doesn’t diminish the tradition. If anything, it reinforces it. I see absolutely no reason we should stop. Is it really an inconvenience to have a simple black bar at the top of the page to act as a reminder?
wolfhumble 3y ago
Warnock also co-created the PostScript page description language, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript RIP John Warnock.
gregw2 3y ago
Good Warnock interview with tech details and history I haven't seen elsewhere: https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-warnock/ https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-warnock/ A good interview detailing among other things why he succesfully made type1 fonts a trade secret for a while: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/adobe-co-founder-john-warnock-on-the-competitive-advantages-of-aesthetics-and-the-right-technology/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/adobe-co-founder... Cringley book chapter on the three way competition of Adobe, Microsoft and Apple: https://www.cringely.com/2013/03/14/accidental-empires-chapter-11-font-wars/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/03/14/accidental-empires-chapt... Found these while looking for John Warnock's blog/website which was really interesting to read in the late 90s but I can't remember its name...
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard": Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browse... >Owen Densmore recounted John Warnock’s idea that PostScript was actually a “linguistic motherboard”. (This was part of a discussion with Owen about NeFS, which was a proposal for the next version of NFS to run a PostScript interpreter in the kernel. More about that here:) https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/linguistic-motherboard-owen.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/linguistic-motherbo... >Window System? ..NeWS ain’ no stinkin’ Window System! -or- Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility, by Owen Densmore, Sun Microsystems, NeWS Team >Introduction >NeWS is difficult to understand simply because it is not just a window system. It is a “Swiss Army Knife” containing several components, some of which contribute to its use as a window system, others which provide the networking facilities for implementing the client-server model, all embedded in a programmable substrate allowing extremely flexible and creative combination of these elements. >During the initial implementation phase of the Macintosh LaserWriter software, I temporarily transfered from Apple to Adobe working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers. At lunch one day, I asked: “John, what do you plan to do after LaserWriter?” His answer was interesting: >PostScript is a linguistic “mother board”, which has “slots” for several “cards”. The first card we (Adobe) built was a graphics card. We’re considering other cards. In particular, we’ve thought about other network services, such as a file server card. >He went on to say how a programmable network was really his goal, and that the printing work was just the first component. His mentioning using PostScript for a file server is particularly interesting: Sun’s next version of NFS is going to use PostScript with file extentions as the client-server protocol! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456710 Brian Reid’s deep detailed historic dive “PostScript and Interpress: a comparison”: https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html
agumonkey 3y ago
One very iconic brand and set of products for sure. magicwand to you.
throw0101b 3y ago
From Computer History Museum, "Adobe Systems - The Founders' Perspective" (2002): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl0GthyD3f0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl0GthyD3f0 Also "PostScript: A Digital Printing Press": * https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printing-press/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printi...
pavlov 3y ago
Adobe practically saved the Mac from an early grave. Desktop publishing was the only killer app for GUI in the late 1980s. Adobe PostScript was a truly genius piece of software that enabled even the relatively low-powered Mac to become a DTP workstation. And of course Warnock was a co-inventor of PostScript.
- coldcode 3y ago
  I learned PostScript in 1988 by studying the Illustrator file format (which eventually became the basis of PDF). It seemed like something from the future given how unavailable high-resolution graphics were at the time. Without Pagemaker + PostScript Apple would have gone under much sooner, and never would have become what it is now. At the same time learning PostScript with reams of paper and basically no tools was a giant pain in the ass.
  - shagie 3y ago
    My father taught himself postscript in the late 80s (it was on the Mac SE). With it and Microsoft Word with a "secret" PostScript style (a particular combination of font, size, italics, underlining, and hidden) allowed him to create a high quality header for a Microsoft Word doc. With it, copied that document and printed it and the university's letterhead was nicely at the top - scaled to any size. It worked just as well on 8x10 as it did on cardstock that was to be sent out. It cut down on the cost for printing for the department because they didn't have to buy as much of the letterhead pre-printed paper. Saved on time too since you just printed it rather than needing to load one special sheet and then print the rest. He saved the stack of paper that he used to learn with for a while. Got four tests per page (four edges and flip). The red book for PostScript laid on top of it.
    - jdswain 3y ago
      That brings back memories. I did almost exactly the same thing, but I created a Postscript program to render a "Common Seal" stamp, that through some process unknown to me could be converted from the printout to an actual stamp. It was all circular, the text was rendered on a path (a circle) and automatically scaled to fit. I used a lot of paper writing that, I went a little further and moved the image to different positions on the page so I could get more than four tests on a page, but still a large amount of paper in the end. I'd forgotten about the Microsoft Word special style that made it all possible. So when I got to use a NextStation with Preview.app, that was a huge revelation, interactive postscript.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Odd HN never mentions the person's achievements in rhe title, even if the actual article title does.
mikerg87 3y ago
Along with Ivan Sutherland he did a lot of foundational work in computer graphics. His PhD was 32 pages, describing this algorithm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  Both at U of U, with all the other founders of computer graphics: Jim Clark, Jim Blinn, Ed Catmull, ...
- smugma 3y ago
  Direct link to PhD thesis: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/warnock-subdivision-for-deferred-lighting/warnock.pdf http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/warnock-subdivision-for-def...
  - vanderZwan 3y ago
    It's a bit sad that the rendered images later on are posterized to the point of being unreadable.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I'm actually surprised he didn't rate a black bar. In any case, Postscript was probably one of the most important technologies of the last century. It afforded some major-league stuff. Funny story: I had an engineer that reworked a vignetting algorithm (image processing module), to be about 100X faster. He wrote the spec for it in pure Postscript. The example illustrations were actually Postscript, executing his algorithm. The folks in Japan defecated masonry over that.
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  I wrote as PS exporter for a 3D sci-viz system in the early 90s. It generated an implementation of Warnock's algorithm for 2D rendering, using a recursive decomposition of 3D primitives, implemented in the stack-based PS programming language. The cool thing was that some parameters to control the rendering were used in the plugin at runtime for file generation (to control file size), but others were written into param declarations in the PS header for execution at print time. PS is text, so you could manually tweak values for the speed-fidelity trade-off at print time, long after after the file was generated. Want to spend 30 minutes rendering to A0 without any depth artifacts? Just change a number in the file header.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > I'm actually surprised he didn't rate a black bar There is one now.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    Awesome! He deserved it.
chris_wot 3y ago
He invented the “Warnock Algorithm” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm Edit: had a brain fart, fixed my idiocy
mistrial9 3y ago
it took me many decades to decode the economics of the intense Desktop Publishing era.. as far as I can see, Apple made hardware, requiring long lead times, large cash reserves, deep industrial secrets.. while Adobe made software and intellectual property, which was fundamental to the written word, changed the entire publishing world, but was copied without paying Adobe. The ecosystem of developers, business and small business around the publishing world, was watched by every literate eyeball, but did not have a transaction model that made Adobe money. Apple in comparison, made plenty of money on each new sale of hardware, but the infrastructure to do that was huge and expensive. When Apple turned on Adobe, over and over again, I did not understand how "Apple bites the hand the feeds it" .. Adobe was a likable brand. Of course, Microsoft betrayed and undermined Apple not repeatedly, but as often as possible, inventing new ways to do it with vigor. No review is possible without mentioning the day that Apple, Microsoft and Adobe were on stage at a trade show, and Apple+Microsoft announced the TrueType standard, and John Warnock literally wept in front of thousands with the shock and betrayal of it. very strange days indeed RIP John Warnock, bright intellect, inventor, leader
- executesorder66 3y ago
  > it took me many decades to decode the economics of the intense Desktop Publishing era So what did you decode about the economics of the intense desktop publishing era?
- hasmanean 3y ago
  Usually the hardware makers are the first to profit after a revolution, but then the next biggest thing in the stack (software) makes 10x the money. In the 1990s Cisco and the ISPs were the biggest internet companies, then it quickly moved to yahoo and google, then mere websites (Facebook, Twitter etc). Methinks apple and Microsoft just bullied Adobe and kept them down.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > When Apple turned on Adobe, over and over again, I did not understand how "Apple bites the hand the feeds it" .. Adobe was a likable brand. It was no Quark, but Adobe was never a likable brand, and has always been as much (if not more) of a monster as Apple. Remember that TrueType was an Apple/Microsoft response to Adobe's behavior around Adobe's monopoly on core desktop publishing technologies. The reason Warnock was on the verge of tears at Seybold in 1989 is because he was forced to compromise on price and terms to keep PostScript on LaserWriters.
refset 3y ago
When John's co-founder Chuck Geschke died a couple of years ago there was a similar thread posted here [0] and someone in the comments mentioned this 2011 CMU lecture by Chuck, "The Adobe Story", which was a pretty great overview of their work and mission: https://youtu.be/apHqb0V3VAM https://youtu.be/apHqb0V3VAM > It's incredibly insightful, full of personal stories from his time at Xerox PARC, under the leadership of Robert Taylor, working with Butler Lampson and so much more about the founding of Adobe and Silicon Valley in general. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26849131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26849131
herodotus 3y ago
As far as I can tell, Apple's Core Graphic engine is in fact an implementation (in C) of Postcript. Warnock's legacy is truly foundational.
- paradox460 3y ago
  NeXT used display PostScript as it's graphics language. When apple was working on OS X they wanted to continue, but we're worried about adobe licensing costs, and so ultimately went with PDF instead
- jdswain 3y ago
  Core Graphics is an implementation of the same imaging model as Postscript and is very close to PDF (and can easily be used to render PDF documents). With Display Postscript you could type in real Postscript commands into your C/Objective-C source file and it was pre-processed into actual code. defineps PSWGrayCircle( ) newpath 10.0 10.0 5.0 0.0 360.0 arc closepath 0.5 setgray fill endps And it could be called just like any other function, including with parameters.
retrocryptid 3y ago
Whoa. I saw him at an event a couple months ago and he seemed pretty fit. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about PARC and Adobe.
- rexreed 3y ago
  Is that event recorded and available for online viewing?
  - retrocryptid 3y ago
    UoU's YouTube channel is at: https://www.youtube.com/@universityofutah/streams https://www.youtube.com/@universityofutah/streams John Warnock's keynote is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4?feature=share&t=4765 https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4?feature=share&t=476... And the whole 3 hour video is the same link sans the t: https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4 https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4 And here's the presser: https://www.cs.utah.edu/50th-anniversary-of-computing-at-the-university-of-utah-and-ieee-milestone-event-march-23-24-2023/ https://www.cs.utah.edu/50th-anniversary-of-computing-at-the...
gdubs 3y ago
Dang: Black bar please. Sad news. Like many I'm sure, one of my first magical experiences with computers was printing a color gradient on a Laserjet printer. Hard to overstate what an influence Adobe's products have had not just on the industry, but society as a whole.
rurban 3y ago
Not this Warnock though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma
anderspitman 3y ago
Dr Warnock spoke several months ago at an awesome graphics symposium at the University of Utah: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4lCCyKkChk&pp=ygUkdXRhaCBncmFwaGljcyBzeW1wb3NpdW0gSm9obiB3YXJub2Nr https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4lCCyKkChk&pp=ygUkdXRhaCBncmFwa...
- dahart 3y ago
  Thanks I even searched for this on YouTube and couldn’t find the link to the edited talk. Here’s another one he gave talking about the development of PostScript: https://youtu.be/DyXiC-MSzwU https://youtu.be/DyXiC-MSzwU
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I flew to Utah for that. It was pretty great
jeffrogers 3y ago
Looking at Adobe's website, you'd never know it...
- ex_mozillian 3y ago
  recheck that...
ChuckMcM 3y ago
It is always sad when someone dies, and especially so when that person was an inspiration for you. I met John at a party that I attended with my wife at PARC where he and Bob Taylor ("Boss Bob") were discussing microcode changes in the Alto that would speed up graphics rendering. As a young over confident pipsqueak I thought I could just wade into that conversation and add my thoughts but got so thoroughly trounced (but in a nice way) I just had to nod and slowly slink away :-). While hanging out with my wife another attendee came up to me and assured me that no, neither Bob nor John were being mean, they just had already covered a lot of the basics and options and their questions were at a much higher level. He assured me I'd catch up, just takes a bit of reading. I said thanks, feeling a bit better but really still feeling like the third grader who finds themselves in a college physics class. When we got home my wife asked me what Bob had said to me, I explained that he and John and pretty much explained that I didn't know enough about graphics algorithms yet to engage in their discussion. She said, "No, not Bob Taylor, Bob Sproul."
- jhh 3y ago
  Just to clarify, not trying to correct anyone here, the third attendee was Bob Sproull, author of "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics"?
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    I have that book. Took me a while to find a copy after reading it in college.
    - larrywright 3y ago
      Just went looking for it myself. Archive.org has it: https://archive.org/details/principlesofinter00newm https://archive.org/details/principlesofinter00newm
      - rbanffy 3y ago
        Doesn’t smell the same.
fortran77 3y ago
See also this 1991 video "Adobe PostScript, the Language of Business" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayb-KF32uWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayb-KF32uWk
lnalx 3y ago
I still remember the day I met John Warnock as if it was yesterday. John's humility, despite his monumental success, taught me to always keep my feet on the ground. His vision inspired me to push boundaries in software development. But above all, it was his passion that kindled a fervor within me to harness technology for change. John Warnock's passing is a massive loss for the tech world. My heart goes out to his loved ones during this time. His legacy, however, will continue to shape the industry, inspiring countless others just as he had inspired me. Goodbye, Mr. Warnock. You will be missed.
jl6 3y ago
/RIP (John Warnock)
hanniabu 3y ago
Hey @dang, I have a simple feature request. Can we have the black bar the the top link to the relevant thread? The story isn't always at the top of the front page and it's annoying having to look through the list to find what it's for.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  If there isn't a list of past In Memoriam posts then that would be good to add too.
whatever1 3y ago
Funny thing, I learned about the guy from something completely irrelevant to adobe. His book on weight loss. Made me understand that at the grand scheme of things it’s a calorie balance problem that one has to solve, regardless of what you eat. His method included junk food and prepackaged food because it is portioned and you know exactly the calorific content. Worked for me. Goodbye:(
- dannyobrien 3y ago
  Are you sure you're not confusing John Warnock with John Walker, author of the Hacker's Diet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
NorSoulx 3y ago
Saddened to hear of John Warnock's passing. His co-founding of Adobe and co-designing PostScript had an impact on solutions I designed and implemented in the beginning of my professional programming career. In the early 90s, I extensively used PostScript for reporting solutions on a bespoke Construction Support System which were used for designing and assembling trains and trams. Those days, working with FORTRAN and PostScript, were foundational for me. To this day, the reference books from that era hold a place on my bookshelf: https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/12/postscript-coding-for-vaxvms-system-in.html https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/12/postscript... Warnock's innovations have been instrumental in shaping digital publishing and design.
jll29 3y ago
R.I.P. Nearly half a century ago, a visualization tool for a port (!) morphed into an interpreter for laser printers: "The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 by John Gaffney at Evans & Sutherland, a computer graphics company. At that time Gaffney and John Warnock were developing an interpreter for a large three-dimensional graphics database of New York Harbor." (Wikipedia) I read about this also in some book (Coders at Work?), and was surprised it did not originate from the graphics design community, although Warnock's wife is a graphics designer. Adobe wasn't named after a habor, but after the little creek behind Warnock's home in California, apparently.
- hamburglar 3y ago
  > R.I.P. Funny dual meaning here. "The RIP" (pronounced as a word) is what they called the PostScript unit on a high end imagesetter like a Linotronic or Agfa. It stands for Raster Image Processor. John was a good dude. Brilliant, and the type of leader that was good to work for as an engineer, because he believed the engineering was the point of it all. > Warnock's wife is a graphics designer The story I always heard about Illustrator is that it started out as a program he wrote for her to make editing PostScript art easier. She also designed the original green Adobe logo, which the current red A logo is derived from.
  - flopsamjetsam 3y ago
    > Funny dual meaning here. "The RIP" (pronounced as a word) is what they called the PostScript unit on a high end imagesetter like a Linotronic or Agfa. It stands for Raster Image Processor. I'm happy to say the usage lives on in RIPs small and big, from wide format printers to digital offset presses.
rbanffy 3y ago
Instead of the black bar, we should add a page curl.
ETH_start 3y ago
We need to collectively work to end biological mortality. People deserve more than 80 years of this life.
- cryptos 3y ago
  I guess this was already discussed elsewhere on HN, but I'm pretty confident that the world wouldn't be better with endless human live.
  - GiorgioG 3y ago
    Agreed. Most (but not all) old people have trouble letting go of old ideas. I can't imagine old powerful people keeping old ideas alive for hundreds of years.
    - codr7 3y ago
      I sure can; without trouble, without even using my imagination.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      Young people can create their own spaces, where old people can't exert influence. No need to murder old people, or deny them lifesaving technologies, just to get your experimental spaces. Also, plenty of old people want to explore new ideas and join these experiments, and if they knew they had more time, possibly many more would too. It's the people who don't believe in the potential of humanity, and thus want to keep human life limited, who seem to lack vision and be stuck in their cynical, rigid mindsets.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    * human capital would improve as the most skilled wouldn't become feeble and die, and would instead see their skills continue to improve * quality of life would massively improve as far fewer people would suffer the tragedy of permanently losing loved ones, and would be saved from the ravages of aging and the anguish of an impending death. Saying nothing about the vastly deeper and greater experiences that much longer lifespans would impart. By world, you mean the environment, due to population growth? By that logic, we should reduce healthcare spending to reduce life expectancy, and with it, the human population. I am pro-humanity, so I want to end death for all people. The problems of overpopulation can be addressed through other means.
WillAdams 3y ago
There are a couple of neat stories including him on Folklore.org: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Origins_of_Spline-Based_and_Anti-Aliased_Fonts.txt&characters=John+Warnock https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Origins_of_Splin... https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Joining_the_Mac_Group.txt&characters=John+Warnock https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Joining_the_Mac_... https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_End_Of_An_Era.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=John+Warnock https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
kristopolous 3y ago
Saw him a few months ago in good health. That was fast

590 points by skilled 3y ago

Say what you want from Adobe's rent-seeking practices, but it's a company that created some of the first, most important real-world applications for personal computers. With Postscript and Photoshop, Adobe revolutionized, if not created, new industries.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
traceroute66 3y ago
> most important real-world applications for personal computers. Applications are one thing (e.g. the way they took away Quark's iron-handed grasp on DTP). But, then there are the standards. For example, PDF. The modern world would barely operate without PDF.
- codethief 3y ago
  > The modern world would barely operate without PDF. Maybe. But maybe people would have simply adopted other standards, like djvu.
  - j1elo 3y ago
    It wouldn't be the same. It would be much more confusing. - Thank you for the meeting, oh and please send me the djvu of your reports - Oh I'd swear we already had this conversation and I had already sent them?
    - cogman10 3y ago
      I'm guessing we'd shorten the name to just vu. djvu is a mouthful.
  - traceroute66 3y ago
    > Maybe. But maybe people would have simply adopted other standards, like djvu. Some people still insist on using non-PDF, for example the Swiss tax office insists on some weird proprietary format[1], QDF made by some obscure company called Snapform. All their forms are in QDF format. It introduces completely un-necessary friction into the process. Everyone knows they should have just used PDF. Instead of forcing people to install some reader software they will never use for any other purpose. [1] https://www.estv.admin.ch/estv/en/home/anticipatory-tax/claim-refund/domicil-abroad.html https://www.estv.admin.ch/estv/en/home/anticipatory-tax/clai...
- postmodest 3y ago
  We'd all be using TeX, right?
  - ruuda 3y ago
    How would we exchange, print, and view rendered documents? DVI perhaps, but it's not completely self-contained.
- layer8 3y ago
  HTML might have become a document interchange format, and we’d be less stuck to fixed page-based layouts as with PDF now.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    Apples and oranges, my friend.
    - layer8 3y ago
      That’s exactly my point though. We might be using oranges instead of apples now if history had been different.
      - weebull 3y ago
        We use both for different things. They don't solve the same problem.
        hasmanean 3y ago
        In a different universe we would have been happy with the limitations of html and published everything with a minimal of markup.
        layer8 3y ago
        For most documents that are published as PDF nowadays, there is only little practical use for them to have a predetermined pagination and layout, and a free-flowing layout would be perfectly fine. If PDF didn’t exist, those documents might instead be typically published in a format more akin to EPUB or MOBI.
- fidotron 3y ago
  This grasp of history isn't quite right. Adobe PostScript, invented by Warnock, was _the_ standard. It was the means by which an application could describe to the computer in the printer the layout of the page. (And later the compute resources in the printer got separated first into Raster Image Processors (RIPs) and later just part of printer drivers in the computers). The development of PDF was driven by the need to resolve incompatibilities in PostScript implementations that had become the nightmare of graphics pros in the early 90s. It was not uncommon to have to use random software to convert one PS file to another PS file which could be understood by the RIP owned by a given print shop. Quark was built on the infrastructure enabled by PostScript in the first place. Edit to add: possible confusion - RIPs were primarily used to generate super high res output on film used for lithographic plates, but they were enabled by the standardization around PostScript for driving laser printers.
  - wbl 3y ago
    Unfortunately today my printer cannot print PDFs with ligatures correctly.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  >>The modern world would barely operate without PDF. PDF was great when most documents needed to be printed, so sending say an invoice to someone you could ensure their printed copy was the same as your printed copy. PDF in "modern" world, where printing is less important and really should be sent to the dust bin if history. PDF has become a complex web of security problems, screen compatibility problems, and various other things including the complex web of converters to take PDF's and make them back into something editable / usable. We need a replacement for PDF, and let PDF go away along with the printer
  - em3rgent0rdr 3y ago
    I get what you are saying. But in a world where most websites looks different on every different browser and browser size and with constantly-changing content, it can be refreshing to have a PDF that whose context is fixed and you know is going to be laid out the same anywhere.
    - jonny_eh 3y ago
      It certainly has its niches, but most people are viewing documents on their phones these days, and PDFs and phones don't work great together.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >PDF in "modern" world, where printing is less important and really should be sent to the dust bin if history. If you do any kind of business at all, especially the accounting side of things, printing is still a hard requirement and PDF makes all that practical.
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      >>especially the accounting side of things, printing is still a hard requirement That is provably false, lots of businesses have gone paperless, and all (at least for the US) government agencies, courts, etc all fully accept erecords, many preferring it.
  - 3y ago
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Don’t forget Flash.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Wasn't that Macromedia, and acquired by Adobe?
- binarymax 3y ago
  Flash was developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe well into its maturity.
  - random3 3y ago
    Photoshop was acquired too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Adobe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Adobe not sure if this is relevant though.
    - richardwhiuk 3y ago
      Prior to it becoming seriously popular though, I think?
      - rmason 3y ago
        At the time it was purchased the company was primarily two brothers from Ann Arbor. Might have had one or two employees.
      - hamburglar 3y ago
        Flash was already quite popular when Adobe acquired Macromedia. I knew of at least one "Flash competitor" project that fizzled out internally before they decided to buy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gumby 3y ago
Thank you for that. I liked and admired Warnock, and hate Adobe. But your framing put it in a proper context. But from the day it was announced I have always thought postscript is completely backwards.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Not to be too forward, but PostScript is supposed to be completely backwards. It's not bad, it's just drawn that way. The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989: https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-october-1989-19e2dfa4d91e https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...
  - paradox460 3y ago
    I often wish we'd have the computing future you guys envisioned. Your work on pie menus alone is incredible, and the demo of NeWS is still mind blowing all these years later
  - gumby 3y ago
    Very funny, Don, but I mean focusing on the rigid constraints of paper rather than the fluid screen environment is to focus on early 20th century technical constraints rather than the future. This when receiving a link to a pdf on your phone the natural action is to ignore it and do something else.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      Seriously, I think PostScript's predecessor Interpress and its successor PDF were more focused on "the rigid constraints of paper" and printed page and document structures than PostScript was. With NeWS, instead of paper, we drew on overlapping arbitrarily shaped nested scaled clipped canvases, and never used the "showpage" operator or DSC (Document Structuring Conventions) or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) comments when using PostScript to draw trees of user interfaces components (like Open Look and PSIBER) and interactive zooming applications and visualizations (like the drawing editor in HyperLook, and the zooming scrolling animated SimCity maps and sprite overlays and graphs). PDF is more constrained and document/page structure focused that free form PostScript even with DSC/EPS, as were Interpress and JaM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Structuring_Conventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Structuring_Conventio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript I always thought it was a bold move to name a page description language for laser printers "JaM" (the predecessor to Interpress). Brian Reid touched on (or rather dove deep into) it when he described the different approaches JaM and Interpress and PostScript had to structure and semantics. The whole article is fascinating, but I'll quote the relevant parts: https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html >From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> >Posted: Fri Mar 1 19:08:05 1985 >Subject: PostScript and Interpress: a comparison [...] >There is, however, a crucial difference between the PostScript and Interpress naming schemes that makes them very different, and makes impossible the above-mentioned imagined compiler to translate PostScript into Interpress. That difference is best understood as a semantic difference, and will be explained in the next section. >Returning to syntactic issues, an Interpress file has what is called "static structure" or "lexical structure". This means that you can look at an Interpress file and make structural assumptions about what you find there. For example, an Interpress file is defined to be a sequence of "bodies"; each body is a sequence of operators and operands. The first body is the "preamble", or setup code; all following bodies correspond to printed pages. If an Interpress file has 11 bodies, then it will print as 10 pages. >By contrast, a PostScript file has no fixed lexical structure; it is just a stream of tokens to be processed by the interpreter. PostScript prints a page whenever the SHOWPAGE operator is executed. If a PostScript file contains a loop from 1 to 10, with a SHOWPAGE operator inside the loop, then it will print 10 pages even though there is only one actual call to SHOWPAGE in the file. However, since PostScript is a textual language, and since it has a "comment" facility like the C /..../ or Pascal {...}, it is possible for the creator of a PostScript file to represent whatever additional information is desired. It is a slight misnomer to call this a comment facility, because the normal use of the word "comment" in programming languages implies that the contents of the comment are irrelevant. PostScript comments are irrelevant in the sense that they do not affect the image produced by a PostScript file, but they do convey machine-readable information about the structure of the document. >A PostScript client is free to choose any structuring scheme that he wants, and the tool that he has available to implement this structuring scheme is the PostScript comment. There is a particular "standard" structuring convention documented along with PostScript by which page boundaries and other lexical information can be marked. A PostScript file that follows that convention is called a "conforming" file, but it is a convention and not a rule; the printed image produced by a nonconforming PostScript file will be identical to that produced by the equivalent conforming PostScript file. Conversely, the structure of a PostScript file, as represented by the structuring convention, is completely independent of the appearance of the page images--the actual PostScript text appears to be a series of comments as far as the structuring systems are concerned. >The technique of mixing two different languages in one file, so that a processor for one language sees the text of the other language as comments, is not new. Perhaps the most widely-known instance of this scheme is Don Knuth's "WEB" system, in which Pascal and TEX are woven together in such a way that the Pascal program looks like a comment to the TEX interpreter and the TEX source looks like a comment to the Pascal compiler. >This absence of fixed lexical structure in PostScript is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it offers more flexibility in creating page images, especially repetitive ones; on the other hand, it provides more opportunities to make mistakes. [...] >An Interpress file consists of a series of bodies. Each body is executed completely independently of each other body. In particular, at the beginning of each page body, the execution environment is restored to the state that it had at the end of execution of the preamble, so that each page body is executed as if it were the only page in the document. There is absolutely nothing that the code in one Interpress page can do that will have any effect on the execution of the code in any other Interpress page, and the Interpress language guarantees that independence. This permits, for example, the pages to be executed or printed in any order, front to back or back to front, or in folios of 16 pages at a time, with complete confidence that the appearance of the pages will not change. >By contrast, a PostScript file has no static structure, so there is no convenient place to build automatic firewalls. PostScript provides, instead, two pairs of operators by which a PostScript user can build his own firewalls wherever he wants them. There is an operator called SAVE, and another operator called RESTORE. The RESTORE operator restores the execution state of the machine back to what it was when the last SAVE operator was executed. Thus, if a PostScript user wants to have pages that are firewalled against each other, then he puts a SAVE operator at the beginning of the page and a RESTORE operator at the end of the page. If the PostScript user wants to play tricks, and build PostScript files that do bizarre things with the execution state between pages, he is free to do so by leaving out the SAVE and RESTORE. >By now you can probably see the fundamental philosophical difference between PostScript and Interpress. Interpress takes the stance that the language system must guarantee certain useful properties, while PostScript takes the stance that the language system must provide the user with the means to achieve those properties if he wants them. With very few exceptions, both languages provide the same facilities, but in Interpress the protection mechanisms are mandatory and in PostScript they are optional. Debates over the relative merits of mandatory and optional protection systems have raged for years not only in the programming language community but also among owners of motorcycle helmets. While the Interpress language mandates a particular organization, the PostScript language provides the tools (structuring conventions and SAVE/RESTORE) to duplicate that organization exactly, with all of the attendant benefits. However, the PostScript user need not employ those tools. >Before taking a stand on this issue, you must remember that neither Interpress nor PostScript is engineered to be a general-purpose programming language, but rather to be a scheme for the description of page images, so it is not necessarily valid to apply programming language lore to these two systems. [...]
sokoloff 3y ago
> Adobe's rent-seeking practices What are these? Adobe provides a large amount of value to the graphics industry and charges a fee for that. People buy it if they want or don't if they don't. I fail to see any rent seeking (seeking to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth to the society).

rvz 3y ago

RIP Warnock. Black bar for this legend please.

apples_oranges 3y ago
Off topic but so many heroes of tech (so to speak) are old now perhaps it’s time to retire the black bar
- agumonkey 3y ago
  hard to say, demographics are regular and we will always have waves of pioneers dying .. I don't know
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    If you place the dawn of the computer era (in terms of more than, say, 1000 people working in the field) sometime in the 1950s, and the youngest of those people were 20 when they began, we are now reaching the point where even the oldest of those people are dead or about to die. Broad demographics are regular, but we're sliding into the period where "the first 10,000 people to make a living from working with computer technology" are all going to be dead or about to die. That's a sort of unique inflection point. If you also reflect on the fact that a lot of the computer technologies that impact people the most today were developed in the 1970s-1990s period, this becomes even more so.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      I understand that these were inflection points, but I was assuming that there would be others on new fields. Maybe less virginial than first processors / OSes / editors / photo editing etc but still pionneers on their domain.
- chongli 3y ago
  The black bar is a simple gesture of respect. The fact that we’ve been losing a lot of important tech people doesn’t diminish the tradition. If anything, it reinforces it. I see absolutely no reason we should stop. Is it really an inconvenience to have a simple black bar at the top of the page to act as a reminder?

wolfhumble 3y ago

Warnock also co-created the PostScript page description language, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript RIP John Warnock.

gregw2 3y ago

Good Warnock interview with tech details and history I haven't seen elsewhere: https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-warnock/ https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-warnock/ A good interview detailing among other things why he succesfully made type1 fonts a trade secret for a while: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/adobe-co-founder-john-warnock-on-the-competitive-advantages-of-aesthetics-and-the-right-technology/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/adobe-co-founder... Cringley book chapter on the three way competition of Adobe, Microsoft and Apple: https://www.cringely.com/2013/03/14/accidental-empires-chapter-11-font-wars/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/03/14/accidental-empires-chapt... Found these while looking for John Warnock's blog/website which was really interesting to read in the late 90s but I can't remember its name...

DonHopkins 3y ago
More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard": Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browse... >Owen Densmore recounted John Warnock’s idea that PostScript was actually a “linguistic motherboard”. (This was part of a discussion with Owen about NeFS, which was a proposal for the next version of NFS to run a PostScript interpreter in the kernel. More about that here:) https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/linguistic-motherboard-owen.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/linguistic-motherbo... >Window System? ..NeWS ain’ no stinkin’ Window System! -or- Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility, by Owen Densmore, Sun Microsystems, NeWS Team >Introduction >NeWS is difficult to understand simply because it is not just a window system. It is a “Swiss Army Knife” containing several components, some of which contribute to its use as a window system, others which provide the networking facilities for implementing the client-server model, all embedded in a programmable substrate allowing extremely flexible and creative combination of these elements. >During the initial implementation phase of the Macintosh LaserWriter software, I temporarily transfered from Apple to Adobe working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers. At lunch one day, I asked: “John, what do you plan to do after LaserWriter?” His answer was interesting: >PostScript is a linguistic “mother board”, which has “slots” for several “cards”. The first card we (Adobe) built was a graphics card. We’re considering other cards. In particular, we’ve thought about other network services, such as a file server card. >He went on to say how a programmable network was really his goal, and that the printing work was just the first component. His mentioning using PostScript for a file server is particularly interesting: Sun’s next version of NFS is going to use PostScript with file extentions as the client-server protocol! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456710 Brian Reid’s deep detailed historic dive “PostScript and Interpress: a comparison”: https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html

agumonkey 3y ago

One very iconic brand and set of products for sure. magicwand to you.

throw0101b 3y ago

From Computer History Museum, "Adobe Systems - The Founders' Perspective" (2002): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl0GthyD3f0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl0GthyD3f0 Also "PostScript: A Digital Printing Press": * https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printing-press/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printi...

pavlov 3y ago

Adobe practically saved the Mac from an early grave. Desktop publishing was the only killer app for GUI in the late 1980s. Adobe PostScript was a truly genius piece of software that enabled even the relatively low-powered Mac to become a DTP workstation. And of course Warnock was a co-inventor of PostScript.

coldcode 3y ago
I learned PostScript in 1988 by studying the Illustrator file format (which eventually became the basis of PDF). It seemed like something from the future given how unavailable high-resolution graphics were at the time. Without Pagemaker + PostScript Apple would have gone under much sooner, and never would have become what it is now. At the same time learning PostScript with reams of paper and basically no tools was a giant pain in the ass.
- shagie 3y ago
  My father taught himself postscript in the late 80s (it was on the Mac SE). With it and Microsoft Word with a "secret" PostScript style (a particular combination of font, size, italics, underlining, and hidden) allowed him to create a high quality header for a Microsoft Word doc. With it, copied that document and printed it and the university's letterhead was nicely at the top - scaled to any size. It worked just as well on 8x10 as it did on cardstock that was to be sent out. It cut down on the cost for printing for the department because they didn't have to buy as much of the letterhead pre-printed paper. Saved on time too since you just printed it rather than needing to load one special sheet and then print the rest. He saved the stack of paper that he used to learn with for a while. Got four tests per page (four edges and flip). The red book for PostScript laid on top of it.
  - jdswain 3y ago
    That brings back memories. I did almost exactly the same thing, but I created a Postscript program to render a "Common Seal" stamp, that through some process unknown to me could be converted from the printout to an actual stamp. It was all circular, the text was rendered on a path (a circle) and automatically scaled to fit. I used a lot of paper writing that, I went a little further and moved the image to different positions on the page so I could get more than four tests on a page, but still a large amount of paper in the end. I'd forgotten about the Microsoft Word special style that made it all possible. So when I got to use a NextStation with Preview.app, that was a huge revelation, interactive postscript.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Odd HN never mentions the person's achievements in rhe title, even if the actual article title does.

mikerg87 3y ago

Along with Ivan Sutherland he did a lot of foundational work in computer graphics. His PhD was 32 pages, describing this algorithm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm

mikhailfranco 3y ago
Both at U of U, with all the other founders of computer graphics: Jim Clark, Jim Blinn, Ed Catmull, ...
smugma 3y ago
Direct link to PhD thesis: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/warnock-subdivision-for-deferred-lighting/warnock.pdf http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/warnock-subdivision-for-def...
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  It's a bit sad that the rendered images later on are posterized to the point of being unreadable.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I'm actually surprised he didn't rate a black bar. In any case, Postscript was probably one of the most important technologies of the last century. It afforded some major-league stuff. Funny story: I had an engineer that reworked a vignetting algorithm (image processing module), to be about 100X faster. He wrote the spec for it in pure Postscript. The example illustrations were actually Postscript, executing his algorithm. The folks in Japan defecated masonry over that.

mikhailfranco 3y ago
I wrote as PS exporter for a 3D sci-viz system in the early 90s. It generated an implementation of Warnock's algorithm for 2D rendering, using a recursive decomposition of 3D primitives, implemented in the stack-based PS programming language. The cool thing was that some parameters to control the rendering were used in the plugin at runtime for file generation (to control file size), but others were written into param declarations in the PS header for execution at print time. PS is text, so you could manually tweak values for the speed-fidelity trade-off at print time, long after after the file was generated. Want to spend 30 minutes rendering to A0 without any depth artifacts? Just change a number in the file header.
lostlogin 3y ago
> I'm actually surprised he didn't rate a black bar There is one now.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Awesome! He deserved it.

chris_wot 3y ago

He invented the “Warnock Algorithm” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock_algorithm Edit: had a brain fart, fixed my idiocy

mistrial9 3y ago

it took me many decades to decode the economics of the intense Desktop Publishing era.. as far as I can see, Apple made hardware, requiring long lead times, large cash reserves, deep industrial secrets.. while Adobe made software and intellectual property, which was fundamental to the written word, changed the entire publishing world, but was copied without paying Adobe. The ecosystem of developers, business and small business around the publishing world, was watched by every literate eyeball, but did not have a transaction model that made Adobe money. Apple in comparison, made plenty of money on each new sale of hardware, but the infrastructure to do that was huge and expensive. When Apple turned on Adobe, over and over again, I did not understand how "Apple bites the hand the feeds it" .. Adobe was a likable brand. Of course, Microsoft betrayed and undermined Apple not repeatedly, but as often as possible, inventing new ways to do it with vigor. No review is possible without mentioning the day that Apple, Microsoft and Adobe were on stage at a trade show, and Apple+Microsoft announced the TrueType standard, and John Warnock literally wept in front of thousands with the shock and betrayal of it. very strange days indeed RIP John Warnock, bright intellect, inventor, leader

executesorder66 3y ago
> it took me many decades to decode the economics of the intense Desktop Publishing era So what did you decode about the economics of the intense desktop publishing era?
hasmanean 3y ago
Usually the hardware makers are the first to profit after a revolution, but then the next biggest thing in the stack (software) makes 10x the money. In the 1990s Cisco and the ISPs were the biggest internet companies, then it quickly moved to yahoo and google, then mere websites (Facebook, Twitter etc). Methinks apple and Microsoft just bullied Adobe and kept them down.
CharlesW 3y ago
> When Apple turned on Adobe, over and over again, I did not understand how "Apple bites the hand the feeds it" .. Adobe was a likable brand. It was no Quark, but Adobe was never a likable brand, and has always been as much (if not more) of a monster as Apple. Remember that TrueType was an Apple/Microsoft response to Adobe's behavior around Adobe's monopoly on core desktop publishing technologies. The reason Warnock was on the verge of tears at Seybold in 1989 is because he was forced to compromise on price and terms to keep PostScript on LaserWriters.

refset 3y ago

When John's co-founder Chuck Geschke died a couple of years ago there was a similar thread posted here [0] and someone in the comments mentioned this 2011 CMU lecture by Chuck, "The Adobe Story", which was a pretty great overview of their work and mission: https://youtu.be/apHqb0V3VAM https://youtu.be/apHqb0V3VAM > It's incredibly insightful, full of personal stories from his time at Xerox PARC, under the leadership of Robert Taylor, working with Butler Lampson and so much more about the founding of Adobe and Silicon Valley in general. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26849131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26849131

herodotus 3y ago

As far as I can tell, Apple's Core Graphic engine is in fact an implementation (in C) of Postcript. Warnock's legacy is truly foundational.

paradox460 3y ago
NeXT used display PostScript as it's graphics language. When apple was working on OS X they wanted to continue, but we're worried about adobe licensing costs, and so ultimately went with PDF instead
jdswain 3y ago
Core Graphics is an implementation of the same imaging model as Postscript and is very close to PDF (and can easily be used to render PDF documents). With Display Postscript you could type in real Postscript commands into your C/Objective-C source file and it was pre-processed into actual code. defineps PSWGrayCircle( ) newpath 10.0 10.0 5.0 0.0 360.0 arc closepath 0.5 setgray fill endps And it could be called just like any other function, including with parameters.

retrocryptid 3y ago

Whoa. I saw him at an event a couple months ago and he seemed pretty fit. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about PARC and Adobe.

rexreed 3y ago
Is that event recorded and available for online viewing?
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  UoU's YouTube channel is at: https://www.youtube.com/@universityofutah/streams https://www.youtube.com/@universityofutah/streams John Warnock's keynote is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4?feature=share&t=4765 https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4?feature=share&t=476... And the whole 3 hour video is the same link sans the t: https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4 https://www.youtube.com/live/VzEaM6QAy-4 And here's the presser: https://www.cs.utah.edu/50th-anniversary-of-computing-at-the-university-of-utah-and-ieee-milestone-event-march-23-24-2023/ https://www.cs.utah.edu/50th-anniversary-of-computing-at-the...

gdubs 3y ago

Dang: Black bar please. Sad news. Like many I'm sure, one of my first magical experiences with computers was printing a color gradient on a Laserjet printer. Hard to overstate what an influence Adobe's products have had not just on the industry, but society as a whole.

rurban 3y ago

Not this Warnock though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma

anderspitman 3y ago

Dr Warnock spoke several months ago at an awesome graphics symposium at the University of Utah: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4lCCyKkChk&pp=ygUkdXRhaCBncmFwaGljcyBzeW1wb3NpdW0gSm9obiB3YXJub2Nr https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4lCCyKkChk&pp=ygUkdXRhaCBncmFwa...

dahart 3y ago
Thanks I even searched for this on YouTube and couldn’t find the link to the edited talk. Here’s another one he gave talking about the development of PostScript: https://youtu.be/DyXiC-MSzwU https://youtu.be/DyXiC-MSzwU
kristopolous 3y ago
I flew to Utah for that. It was pretty great

jeffrogers 3y ago

Looking at Adobe's website, you'd never know it...

ex_mozillian 3y ago
recheck that...

ChuckMcM 3y ago

It is always sad when someone dies, and especially so when that person was an inspiration for you. I met John at a party that I attended with my wife at PARC where he and Bob Taylor ("Boss Bob") were discussing microcode changes in the Alto that would speed up graphics rendering. As a young over confident pipsqueak I thought I could just wade into that conversation and add my thoughts but got so thoroughly trounced (but in a nice way) I just had to nod and slowly slink away :-). While hanging out with my wife another attendee came up to me and assured me that no, neither Bob nor John were being mean, they just had already covered a lot of the basics and options and their questions were at a much higher level. He assured me I'd catch up, just takes a bit of reading. I said thanks, feeling a bit better but really still feeling like the third grader who finds themselves in a college physics class. When we got home my wife asked me what Bob had said to me, I explained that he and John and pretty much explained that I didn't know enough about graphics algorithms yet to engage in their discussion. She said, "No, not Bob Taylor, Bob Sproul."

jhh 3y ago
Just to clarify, not trying to correct anyone here, the third attendee was Bob Sproull, author of "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics"?
- rbanffy 3y ago
  I have that book. Took me a while to find a copy after reading it in college.
  - larrywright 3y ago
    Just went looking for it myself. Archive.org has it: https://archive.org/details/principlesofinter00newm https://archive.org/details/principlesofinter00newm
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      Doesn’t smell the same.

fortran77 3y ago

See also this 1991 video "Adobe PostScript, the Language of Business" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayb-KF32uWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayb-KF32uWk

lnalx 3y ago

I still remember the day I met John Warnock as if it was yesterday. John's humility, despite his monumental success, taught me to always keep my feet on the ground. His vision inspired me to push boundaries in software development. But above all, it was his passion that kindled a fervor within me to harness technology for change. John Warnock's passing is a massive loss for the tech world. My heart goes out to his loved ones during this time. His legacy, however, will continue to shape the industry, inspiring countless others just as he had inspired me. Goodbye, Mr. Warnock. You will be missed.

jl6 3y ago

/RIP (John Warnock)

hanniabu 3y ago

Hey @dang, I have a simple feature request. Can we have the black bar the the top link to the relevant thread? The story isn't always at the top of the front page and it's annoying having to look through the list to find what it's for.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
If there isn't a list of past In Memoriam posts then that would be good to add too.

whatever1 3y ago

Funny thing, I learned about the guy from something completely irrelevant to adobe. His book on weight loss. Made me understand that at the grand scheme of things it’s a calorie balance problem that one has to solve, regardless of what you eat. His method included junk food and prepackaged food because it is portioned and you know exactly the calorific content. Worked for me. Goodbye:(

dannyobrien 3y ago
Are you sure you're not confusing John Warnock with John Walker, author of the Hacker's Diet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)

NorSoulx 3y ago

Saddened to hear of John Warnock's passing. His co-founding of Adobe and co-designing PostScript had an impact on solutions I designed and implemented in the beginning of my professional programming career. In the early 90s, I extensively used PostScript for reporting solutions on a bespoke Construction Support System which were used for designing and assembling trains and trams. Those days, working with FORTRAN and PostScript, were foundational for me. To this day, the reference books from that era hold a place on my bookshelf: https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/12/postscript-coding-for-vaxvms-system-in.html https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/12/postscript... Warnock's innovations have been instrumental in shaping digital publishing and design.

jll29 3y ago

R.I.P. Nearly half a century ago, a visualization tool for a port (!) morphed into an interpreter for laser printers: "The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 by John Gaffney at Evans & Sutherland, a computer graphics company. At that time Gaffney and John Warnock were developing an interpreter for a large three-dimensional graphics database of New York Harbor." (Wikipedia) I read about this also in some book (Coders at Work?), and was surprised it did not originate from the graphics design community, although Warnock's wife is a graphics designer. Adobe wasn't named after a habor, but after the little creek behind Warnock's home in California, apparently.

hamburglar 3y ago
> R.I.P. Funny dual meaning here. "The RIP" (pronounced as a word) is what they called the PostScript unit on a high end imagesetter like a Linotronic or Agfa. It stands for Raster Image Processor. John was a good dude. Brilliant, and the type of leader that was good to work for as an engineer, because he believed the engineering was the point of it all. > Warnock's wife is a graphics designer The story I always heard about Illustrator is that it started out as a program he wrote for her to make editing PostScript art easier. She also designed the original green Adobe logo, which the current red A logo is derived from.
- flopsamjetsam 3y ago
  > Funny dual meaning here. "The RIP" (pronounced as a word) is what they called the PostScript unit on a high end imagesetter like a Linotronic or Agfa. It stands for Raster Image Processor. I'm happy to say the usage lives on in RIPs small and big, from wide format printers to digital offset presses.

rbanffy 3y ago

Instead of the black bar, we should add a page curl.

ETH_start 3y ago

We need to collectively work to end biological mortality. People deserve more than 80 years of this life.

cryptos 3y ago
I guess this was already discussed elsewhere on HN, but I'm pretty confident that the world wouldn't be better with endless human live.
- GiorgioG 3y ago
  Agreed. Most (but not all) old people have trouble letting go of old ideas. I can't imagine old powerful people keeping old ideas alive for hundreds of years.
  - codr7 3y ago
    I sure can; without trouble, without even using my imagination.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    Young people can create their own spaces, where old people can't exert influence. No need to murder old people, or deny them lifesaving technologies, just to get your experimental spaces. Also, plenty of old people want to explore new ideas and join these experiments, and if they knew they had more time, possibly many more would too. It's the people who don't believe in the potential of humanity, and thus want to keep human life limited, who seem to lack vision and be stuck in their cynical, rigid mindsets.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  * human capital would improve as the most skilled wouldn't become feeble and die, and would instead see their skills continue to improve * quality of life would massively improve as far fewer people would suffer the tragedy of permanently losing loved ones, and would be saved from the ravages of aging and the anguish of an impending death. Saying nothing about the vastly deeper and greater experiences that much longer lifespans would impart. By world, you mean the environment, due to population growth? By that logic, we should reduce healthcare spending to reduce life expectancy, and with it, the human population. I am pro-humanity, so I want to end death for all people. The problems of overpopulation can be addressed through other means.

WillAdams 3y ago

There are a couple of neat stories including him on Folklore.org: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Origins_of_Spline-Based_and_Anti-Aliased_Fonts.txt&characters=John+Warnock https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Origins_of_Splin... https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Joining_the_Mac_Group.txt&characters=John+Warnock https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Joining_the_Mac_... https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_End_Of_An_Era.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=John+Warnock https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

kristopolous 3y ago

Saw him a few months ago in good health. That was fast