Industry Hall Of Fame Introduction

Paul Allen Programming Pioneer

Tim Berners-Lee Developer Of The World Wide Web

Dan Bricklin Creator Of The Electronic Spreadsheet

Vint Cerf The Father Of The Internet

Ross Cooley Compaq's Channel Champion

Larry Ellison Database Dynamo

Bronson Ingram King Of Global Distribution Empire

Charles Wang Software Mangement Mogul

John Warnock Wizard Of Type

Steve Wozniak Apple's Engineering Genius

Development Teams Introduction

The Compaq Portable

The Intel 386SX

Lotus 1-2-3

Microsoft Windows

And he believes he got lucky when he and partner Charles Geschke founded a company that would forever alter the ancient process of applying print to paper and would spark one of the most explosive movements in the high-technology industry--desktop publishing.

"It was sort of very serendipitous," Warnock said of the success of his company, Adobe Systems Inc., of which he is now chief executive. "A lot of revolutions and revolutionary things happening in the industry are really the right things coming together at the right time."

Yet, while the ever-modest Warnock--a classic intellectual, who even looks the part with his fluffy beard and glasses--shies away from his monumental success by talking about luck, his friends and associates know better. They describe Warnock as a man consumed by his quest to forever change the art of publishing. And when they talk about him, they use one word again and again: "passion."

"You can see it when John describes an idea or thinks of a new piece of technology," Geschke said. "Once he got excited about an idea, he had the passion to make it reality."

However, passion alone did not motivate Warnock to seek a career as a high-tech revolutionary. In fact, he entered the high-tech business because of the universal motivator--money. He took his first tech job while working his way through a Master's degree in mathematics at the University of Utah in 1961.

"I had an abysmal summer job that paid absolutely no money," he said, remembering his job recapping tires for a rubber company. "It was the worst job I'd ever had. It paid $1.50 an hour. It was 115 [degrees] in the shade. I said, this is crazy, I'm going to go get a real job."

And get a real job he did, joining IBM Corp. There, the company helped him begin his quest in the field of technology. The job would serve as a springboard for his training in the industry, which would come mainly via positions with established companies.

"I interviewed at IBM, and they paid me more money than I'd ever seen in my life," Warnock said. "They sent me around the country to get all of this training. It was actually a very wonderful experience."

But the call of technology was not quite clear enough yet. Warnock returned to Utah to earn a Ph.D. and teach. He was determined to become a math professor. Then he felt another financial pinch.

"I was getting married in '65 and decided the only way I could afford to get married was to get a real job again," Warnock said. So he took a job in the computer center at the university. And, slowly, he developed a love for technology.

His love affair with computers was just beginning. By the late 1970s, Warnock found his way to another industry giant: Xerox Corp. He went to work for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a renowned center of innovation. The man who hired him was Geschke.

The two had a lot in common--beards, three kids and soccer refereeing. And both were passionate about developing technology that would revolutionize the printing and publishing process, which they did when they developed Interpress, the forerunner of the Adobe PostScript language. But at Xerox PARC, it was destined to writhe in obscurity. Xerox adopted the technology as a standard but would not let its creators market it as a separate entity.

"I was concerned that here was technology that was state of the art. Technology is like fish: If you don't cook it, it spoils," Geschke said.

Worried that his and Geschke's creation would never see the light of day outside Xerox, they broke from the company. Warnock and Geschke, determined to carry out the vision, formed Adobe in 1982.

"We felt that there was an opportunity in publishing to create high-end workstations and hook them into laser printers," Warnock said.

It was then that luck began to kick in. Adobe pinned its hopes on PostScript, which had matured from its more conceptual days at Xerox, and the industry responded. Printer, typesetter and image-setter manufacturers lined up to latch on to PostScript.

Then, Adobe dealt the death blow to its competitors by signing IBM, the very company where Warnock had gotten his start in the industry.

"We happened to hit the timing exactly right," Warnock said, still, characteristically, reluctant to take credit for his accomplishments. "There were three or four things coming together at exactly the right time: There was the graphical user interface from Apple [Computer Inc.] on a low-cost machine--Macintosh. There was Canon [Inc.'s] first low-cost laser printer. There was our development of PostScript, and there was [Aldus Corp. Chief Executive] Paul Brainerd putting together PageMaker on the Macintosh."

The revolution had begun, and it still rages today. Adobe is now the standard- bearer in desktop publishing. In 16 years, it has grown from an idea deep inside a think tank to a company with a market capitalization of more than $2 billion that employs more than 2,500 people. Its creations--PostScript, the Acrobat file format, the PhotoShop image editor--have become everyday words for publishers and Internet users.

But Warnock refuses to accept his status as a revolutionary. "We have been lucky enough to be a part of a very significant change in the industry," he said. "I do not consider myself to be a prime mover of that."

Geschke disagrees. "I think the results have been revolutionary. Today, you can't pick up printed material or watch TV or a motion picture and not see a piece of Adobe's technology," Geschke said.

Warnock's associates said he remains largely unchanged despite his success. Warnock and Geschke still mingle with the rank and file in Adobe's San Jose, Calif., headquarters, often eating and chatting with a table full of engineers. But Warnock is not a workaholic and does not ask his people to be. Married 33 years, he understands the importance of spending time at home.

"Chuck and I were fairly old when we started Adobe. I was 42 and he was 43," he said. "We decided that if we were going to start the company, we were going to start the company with a balance in our lives. If we couldn't succeed by being smart five days a week, we probably deserved to fail. I just don't think that's the way to live your life."

It might seem that the 58-year old Warnock should retire in style--serving the community, living life as a family man and sustaining a corporate revolution take time and energy. But Warnock is still driven by his passion to innovate and lead.

"I'm busy right now," Warnock said with a laugh. "Both Chuck and I want to see a very strong management team at Adobe and very strong prospects going out for at least two or three years before we could think about it. We care very deeply about the company, and we don't want to abandon it."

And, with Warnock's leadership, Adobe is likely to keep on getting lucky.