John Warnock, the inventor of PostScript and the founder of Adobe Systems, plots the future of media.
__PostScript is to printer output what Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was to orchestral music in the 19th century: a stunning surprise. Meet the Prince of PostScript, the man whose inventive software stood the look and feel of computer output on its head, Doctor John. Warnock is a jeans-and-comfy-sweater kind of guy among the sharks and nerds who captain the other great software companies. In his office between meetings, he has the genteel aura of a professor (in fact he has a PhD in electrical engineering) ready to grade freshman papers. To a suggestion that he might someday be considered one of the great working mathematicians of the 20th century he gives a kind of aw-shucks reply. But his invention of the PostScript language changed the way the world sees what's written, drawn, or scanned with a computer. Without PostScript, the magazine you are reading would probably not exist today, or worse, would look like a collection of invoices from a dentist's office.
Warnock is modest in the extreme, instantly sharing each ounce of praise, crediting his team and longtime partner Chuck Geschke at every possible opportunity.
But there is another side to Warnock: that of the ferocious competitor, the 20/20 visionary, the strategist with boardroom battle skills and the demeanor of Lao Tzu. With the anticipated July acquisition of Seattle-based Aldus Corporation, Warnock will become chairman and CEO of one of the world's largest software companies. The new combined Adobe Systems Incorporated will begin life with annual revenues of US$525 million.
The applications that have gotten Adobe there – Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Adobe Acrobat – are tools that help create brilliant digital images, blending words and pictures. Thanks to Adobe tools, those images migrate effortlessly from print to screen, incorporate sound and motion, and give a rich experience to viewers. This is the kind of software that will be expensive for its buyers and profitable for its sellers for years to come.
Warnock, above all, admires invention. Yes, he runs the company, but he has continued to conduct his own research with Geschke, his collaborator of twenty years. Adobe insiders were not surprised last year when Warnock abandoned his glitzy CEO showplace in a new Mountain View, California, headquarters building – for a no-frills desk in a corner of the engineering building that allowed him to "escape from the accountants and attorneys." That's where David Henry Goodstein caught up with him to chat.__
Wired: What made you decide to be a mathematician?
Warnock:
It was actually a teacher. I flunked ninth-grade algebra, but I had a high school teacher whose creative way of exposing mathematics showed me the intrigue and the beauty of it. I became enamored of the subject.
What are you reading?
Well, I read a lot of history these days, like Daniel Boorstin's books about creators and discoverers. The history of ideas and of intellectual development, how people invent things, and what causes society to change are really areas of interest for me.
What have you learned?
That really very few inspirations are bolts out of the blue. There are exceptions to that, times when an idea flops down and you can't find any connections to the past. Napier. Logarithms. Sort of - pow! He figured this out, and there really wasn't a deep structure behind it.
On the other hand, everybody gives Newton credit for having had a bolt out of the blue with the invention of the laws of physics. Many trends were influencing Newton, causing him to think about things in certain ways, and to arrive at the conclusions that he did. It's not coincidental that a year before he made his greatest breakthroughs, the first English editions of work by Galileo and Kepler were produced.
Isn't that era of special interest to you?
Yes, I collect rare books, especially first editions of old science, philosophy, and literature works. Having the first copy of these great ideas, seeing how they looked when they were put down on paper, being able to read those and see how the ideas were formulated is really nice. It takes you back to the roots. My work has always been very closely linked to information invention, to how people think about things and how culture evolved. And so it's interesting to own artifacts that represent transitions in history.
