John Warnock

John Warnock was an American computer scientist, inventor and technology businessman, born in 1940 and raised in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay, Utah. He earned his doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Utah, where his thesis introduced the Warnock algorithm for hidden-surface determination in computer graphics. After working at Xerox PARC with Charles Geschke, he left in 1982 to co-found Adobe Systems, named after Adobe Creek. He served as its president for the first two years and as chairman and chief executive for the next sixteen, and he co-chaired the board until 2017. He led the early products PostScript, Adobe Illustrator and the Portable Document Format, which helped make desktop publishing possible. He died in 2023.