Adobe Acrobat v1.0

Adobe Systems Inc.
1993

First software that allowed electronic documents to be transmitted and viewed in perfect fidelity regardless of operating system. Was the brainchild of John Warnock, CEO of Adobe, who wanted a way to distribute information without losing its original formatting, fonts and layout. This was not possible and just a dream in the late 1980’s. People couldn’t even get the right fonts to show up between a Mac and a PC at that point.  Groundbreaking functionality and feature set. Many innovations and inventions were in the first version.

I was part of a tiny skunkworks team within Adobe (codenamed “Carousel”) that was tasked with designing, prototyping, then building this for real. I wrote a book treatment about this period of time.

PERSONAL NOTE: This will probably end up in my obituary as my greatest professional accomplishment. I don’t disagree.

ROLE: Design, Coding, Engineering Management