Adobe Founders - Charles Geschke and John Warnock Interview - March 28, 2000

The Santa Clara Valley Historical Association interviewed Charles Geschke and John Warnock in 2000. This is a segment from the full unscripted interview.

Charles Geschke and John Warnock 2000 Interview
Interviewer: John McLaughlin, Historian and President of the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association
Interview date: March 28, 2000

Interviewer's question:
"This is going to be a long question, but maybe I can keep it kind of short. I wondered if you could run through the steps in the development of your technology, in kind of a rapid sequence, perhaps going back to PARC."

Transcript (partial):
". . . Yeah, and when we decided to leave XEROX, we looked at opportunities to take a comparable kind of technology and apply it out in the external world to where we saw the opportunity for personal workstations and personal computers. As we looked at the work we had done at PARC, in order to be successful at printing, the one area that we really had never broken through on was how you handle high-quality typography. Conventional wisdom in the late '70s and early '80s was that the only way you could get a bit-map representation of a character to really look good was to hand tune it very carefully for the particular printing process. Well, if you think through the thousands of typefaces and literally tens to hundreds of thousands of characters, particularly in languages like Japanese and Chinese, it would have been totally unrealistic if we hadn't found a solution to how you could represent, in one single mathematical description, the shape of a character so that it could be rendered on any of the devices, whether they're printers or displays. And it was really that breakthrough as part of our development at Adobe that distinguished what we had done and began the foundation of building that market."

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