PDF began by unwinding printer code, and Adobe's own salespeople didn't get the point
John Warnock's Camelot memo proposed shipping a page's drawing instructions and fonts across incompatible computers. Early demos still baffled people.
Adobe had a way to send a document between incompatible computers, and people wanted to know why anybody would bother. You can almost hear the support call that would follow: just send the Word file, surely the other person’s Word will open it.
John Warnock remembered exactly that objection in his 2018 oral history. Early demonstrations left his own sales team puzzled. His compact verdict was “nobody got it.”
The six-page proposal gets wonderfully specific. A PostScript program draws a polygon using a loop and trigonometry. Camelot changes what the drawing operators do, so running that program writes out its resulting coordinates. The recipient gets a simpler description of the same shape, without having to repeat the original program’s work.
The memo also proposes including just the font characters the document uses. Shipping the letters with the page is a pretty reasonable response to discovering the recipient’s computer has substituted something hideous.
Warnock’s memo starts with fax as the existing compromise: a way to move visual material that still ends in remote paper, with quality and bandwidth costs. His target machines include PCs with 640 KB, Macs, mainframes and workstations. Demanding a powerful desktop and a PostScript printer would leave too much of that installed base outside the proposed system.
The polygon example shows how the conversion relocates effort. The original program calculates a ten-sided shape; redefining its drawing operators makes execution produce coordinates and simpler commands. The recipient can consume those results without rerunning the original loop and trigonometry. It is rather like sending the measured cutting list along with the cabinet design, so the next workshop doesn’t have to calculate every length again.
Warnock’s oral history also distinguishes an impressive prototype from the implementation intended to become the format. He recalls bringing in Peter Hibbard and Richard Cohen for the architecture and documenting it along the way. The goal included extensibility, because a delivery format needed room for more than the first demo’s contents.
That ambition makes the sales reaction easier to understand. People already had document files and programs that could print them. The failure appeared between machines, applications and versions, often after the sender’s part of the job looked finished. A demonstration on the presenter’s own setup had to persuade someone about the problems awaiting the recipient.
There’s a small historical wrinkle. Warnock recalled writing the memo in 1991; Adobe’s anniversary account dates it to summer 1990 and places Acrobat 1.0’s debut on June 15, 1993. The memo itself is publicly readable, even though its date gets retold differently.
The next document tool promising universal compatibility still has Warnock’s awkward demo to pass. It needs to work on the other person’s computer, with the other person’s software, after the original application has disappeared.