When it comes to publishing, PDF technology is so integral and so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. It replaced film in the prepress systems of commercial print publishing. It underlies publications made with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, like National Geographic and Rolling Stone. And of course, it is the format for publications like InDesign Magazine. And there are millions upon millions of everyday documents produced, distributed, and read in PDF, everything from IRS tax forms to school lunch menus.
And yet, there was a time not that long ago when PDF did not exist. In fact June 2013 is the 20th anniversary of PDF. To mark the occasion, Adobe Systems co-founder John Warnock and Adobe senior vice president of technology Bob Wulff were interviewed by Knowledge@Wharton, the Wharton Shool’s online business journal.
The interview is a must-read for the perspective it offers (imagine a world where you had to distribute your documents in Word!), for cool trivia (how a Steve Jobs MacWorld demo influenced the development of PDF), and for the outspoken opinions of John Warnock, including his thoughts on “the fundamental error in the design” of the Web.
This article was last modified on July 7, 2023
This article was first published on June 17, 2013
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