Tldr He wrote a paper that outlined a portable document format: the PDF.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Prett incredible. Imagine having that on your resume
And then submitting that resume as a 10pt Arial Word doc
Indeed, John Warnock's invention of the PDF format has had a significant impact on the way we interact with documents in the digital age. It's remarkable how something as seemingly simple as a file format can revolutionize desktop publishing and streamline the sharing of documents across different platforms. His contributions to the internet and technology will certainly be remembered.
Maybe it was a short dissertation, but the standard grew huge, it's 986 pages: https://www.iso.org/standard/75839.html
This is the reason there are few pdf editors, and their features vary greatly, it's a huge task to impement that standard from scratch.
He made the world better but then he made Adobe.
He co-invented PDF in '91. His PhD thesis, referenced in the summary, is a solution to the hidden line problem in computer graphics.