John Warnock

Documents that print and look the same everywhere. Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox PARC to found Adobe in 1982 and built PostScript, a language that let any printer reproduce a page exactly, which made desktop publishing possible. In the early 1990s Warnock pushed the Camelot project that became PDF, and Adobe gave the reader away free. The format became the default for contracts, forms and manuals. He died in 2023.