Remembering Adobe co-founder and Bodley Medal honorand Dr John Warnock

Image credit: Adobe

Dr John Warnock, the American computer scientist best known as the co-founder of Adobe Systems, has died aged 82.

Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Charles Geschke. He retired as CEO in 2000 and was chairman of the board, a position he shared with Geschke, until 2017.

A longstanding friend to the Bodleian Libraries, in 2003 he was awarded our highest accolade, the Bodley Medal, at a presentation held in San Francisco, USA, for his contribution to digital innovation and advancements in online collections.

Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian and Director of Gardens, Libraries and Museums at Oxford University, said:

John Warnock was one of the great pioneers of the digital age - his vision and his accomplishments with Adobe are rightly legendary - and the world of libraries, archives and the broader information sphere continues to benefit from those innovations on a daily basis. John was also a great book collector, and he saw himself as building on the intellectual developments made by some of the great scientific minds of past periods. John was a great friend of the Bodleian, and it was a huge pleasure to work with him over the years, bringing out some of the Bodleian's typographical treasures to help design new digital typefaces. The world of information has lost one of its greats.

Find out more about Dr Warnock in this interview to commemorate his Bodley Medal award.